


Histories

by marysutherland



Series: Harry/Molly sequence [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, M/M, historians have murky pasts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-03
Updated: 2011-11-03
Packaged: 2017-10-25 16:06:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 34,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marysutherland/pseuds/marysutherland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A difficult weekend for Molly, Harry, John and Sherlock brings back a lot of memories</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Friday afternoon: Molly

**Author's Note:**

> Discussion of alcoholism and drug-taking, homophobia, swearing.
> 
> Huge thanks to my beta [Blooms84](http://archiveofourown.org/users/blooms84/) for tackling this monster and making extremely helpful suggestions

A couple more hours to go, Molly thought, as she sat in the office of the mortuary. She could cope for that long, she had to. Thank goodness it had been quiet today, mainly paperwork to catch up on. Just one more form to fill in. _Date of death (state if provisional or confirmed): 21 st March 2011 (provisional)_.  Double-check that, because she didn't want to make any careless errors. She was determined not to cry, but it wasn't easy. For all her professionalism, it was hard to focus on work when she’d just broken up with Harry. _Date of death of relationship: 24 th March 2011 (confirmed)._

It had taken all of Molly’s courage to leave Harry. But a woman of thirty-two, with two divorces behind her, should not be staying in a relationship that was heading for disaster. That had been her mistake before, to think that things could be fixed, when they clearly couldn’t be. To see what was going wrong, but not observe it, recognise it. That was why she hadn’t broken up with Peter Smith or Paul Kablinski, even when she should have done.

This time was going to be different. For her sake, she’d had to act. For Harry’s sake, even. She was not prepared to indulge, to _enable_ Harry's destructive habits. This wasn’t going to be the story of Molly Smith all over again. 

***

 **Molly Smith (1998-2002)**

You could put her marriage to Peter down to a youthful mistake: they’d both been ridiculously young. Who got married aged twenty, part way through medical school? She did, because it had been Peter's bright idea. Peter was the one who always had the bright ideas. He was the brilliant one; she’d realised that the first time they’d met, in the long, lazy summer before they both went to university in London. He was the one who’d had the bright idea of them moving in together when they got to London, saving money on rent, even if it had been Molly who'd sorted out the practical details of where. He was the one who taught her about London, and about sex, and who had attempted to teach her about particle physics, and programming, and atonal music.

She hadn't properly observed what was happening even when Peter had left his course at Imperial early in the second year. He’d been accused of ‘lack of application’, which was deeply unfair. Peter’s brain, his interests, moved so fast that he found an ordinary course stultifying. Dropping out of college hadn’t harmed Bill Gates, why shouldn’t Peter be a success? There were all sorts of things he could do.

There were too many things Peter could do, and he got bored of them too quickly. The only thing he didn’t get bored of, but relied on was Molly. Molly was his rock, a rock for Peter, Petros the rock. Other people might think it was stupid to get married at twenty, say you couldn’t really know what you wanted, but Peter knew better. Peter always knew better.

Molly didn’t know any better, which was why she stuck with Peter for so long, because surely, if he was brilliant and she loved him, things would work out eventually? You didn’t get to be a doctor by giving in when the going got tough. But it was getting tougher. Peter didn’t want to talk to her about physics or music now, or go out and explore London with her...or have sex, most of the time. He spent his life staring at a computer screen, or pacing the streets of London alone. Or getting reassurance from Molly. Or arguing with her. Too often now, she wasn’t Peter’s rock. Instead she was the boulder weighing him down, blocking his path.

But she stayed, because she wanted to prove the friends wrong who were telling her that she'd made a mistake. And because she didn’t know what else to do. And then Sherlock appeared, and started to experiment on her.

***

She’d once written something embarrassing on her blog about love at first sight. It would have been much, much worse if she’d admitted she’d been in and out of love with Sherlock for eight years. Well, mostly in. Although you could hardly call it staying in a relationship for too long if you’d never actually had a relationship.

She’d met Sherlock when she was being a guinea pig (before he’d turned her into a mouse). Medical  trials had been a way to make extra money in her final years as a student, to meet Peter’s ever-increasing need for expensive computer equipment. And it was contributing to research. She’d stuck to the safer options - nutrition, neurology, psychology - and soon had a detailed knowledge of her reaction to sugary food, the patterns of her brainwaves, and her mild neuroses.

Sherlock had been vaguely attached to Queen Mary College at the time, and doing experiments on memory and perception. She’d carried out a few studies for him, but not only had she completely missed someone in a gorilla suit popping up in a video, she knew she'd barely have noticed an actual gorilla sitting in her lap if he was around. She was thoroughly distracted by dreaming about him, his dishevelled black curls, his pale, pale blue eyes. He’d probably not even registered her, she thought, until he came up to her one day after an experiment, and said:

"It’s Molly, isn’t it? Ms Molly Hooper-Smith?" His voice was deep, and when he spoke it sent shivers down her spine.

"Mrs Molly Smith," she said. Peter preferred that.

"I have a rather unusual proposition for you," he said. "A psychology experiment. Do you drink at all?"

She wasn’t sure of the right answer. "Um, a glass or two of wine sometimes, not that much."

He smiled disturbingly. "That’s good. I’m conducting an experiment on alcohol consumption and inhibitions, but the ethics committee have turned this one down flatly, so I’m going to need to do it unofficially. I’d like you to come round to my flat."

"I see," said Molly, and she found herself saying. "To do what?"

"I’ll get you drunk, while asking you questions. Personal questions, ones you probably wouldn’t answer when sober. And I'll record the results. You’d be paid well, of course, this is a far more intrusive experiment than normal."

She was almost certain she knew what he intended, but the mention of money made her slightly queasy. On the other hand, she and Peter were particularly short of cash this month, and she...liked Sherlock. It wasn't as if Peter wanted her in bed anymore. In the evenings, she'd put her hand on his shoulder, sometimes, as he sat hunched over his laptop, and he'd squirm and tell her to leave him alone. Maybe she should show Peter that someone else _was_ interested in her.

"I’d like to help you out," she said, staring up at him as confidently as she could.  

***

Sherlock's flat was cramped, crowded with piles of papers and glassware and even a skull, and as she sat at the kitchen table in her best black dress, Molly felt it was still rather like a scientific experiment. Especially when Sherlock started running through a checklist of questions about her age, height, weight and patterns of alcohol consumption. But he didn't look like a scientist, in his smart trousers and beautifully fitted dark blue shirt. He looked _edible_.

"You normally drink only a glass or two of wine at social events," he said. "We'll start with three glasses then. You haven't eaten recently, have you?"

"No," she said. Even if he hadn't warned her about that, she'd have been too nervous to have anything. "Three glasses is going to get me pretty far gone, you know."

"That's the idea," he said. "In the case I'm interested in, the victim, who was normally a light drinker, drank half a bottle quite rapidly, under the stress of a recent divorce. I'm wanting to assess the likely effects on her conversation."

"The victim?"

"It's a specific case I'm interested in, a matter of criminal psychology. Don't worry, you can stay here till you sober up. You'll be in no danger."

He smiled at her, a friendly smile, she thought. Hoped. I could walk out of the door now, she told herself. That's the sensible thing to do, and I've always been sensible. Except, of course, where clever men were concerned. She stayed where she was.

"Right," said Sherlock. "Three glasses, at ten minute intervals. In between, just sit there and imagine you're a woman with an unhappy love life. You're having rather better wine than Mrs Armitage would have been drinking, but the alcohol content's similar."

Molly gulped down the first glass nervously and then sat, and tried not to look at Sherlock and not to think about Peter. She drank the second glass and found herself staring at Sherlock's gorgeous, impassive face, simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. A god, a monster. She drank the third glass and he smiled at her and said:

"What's 15 times 15?"

"225," she said after a little hesitation. She was relieved that her voice was still clear, even if her mind wasn't.  The questions started to pour out of Sherlock:

"Name the noble gases in order."

"Who was the first boy you kissed?"

"How many brothers and sisters do you have?"

"At what age did you lose your virginity?"

"17," she said. "It was Peter, my husband, well, he wasn't my husband then."

"I just need to know the age. Have you ever slept with a woman?"

"No."

"Have you ever slept with a man apart from your husband?"

"No," she said, and she knew she was blushing.

"Has your husband ever cheated on you?"

"No," she whispered. "He's not been physically unfaithful."

"Have you ever fantasized about men other than your husband?"

"Yes," she said. She wanted to say: _You didn't need to do all this, I would have told you the truth without you getting me drunk_. But she didn't know how to explain, and it was so hard to think straight.

"Have you ever thought about cheating on your husband?"

"No...yes...no." The way he looked at her as if he wanted to see into her soul was amazing, she thought dreamily. There was no turning back now; he could do whatever he wanted with her.

Sherlock opened his gorgeous, gorgeous mouth and said:

"Have you ever cheated on an exam?"

Why was he asking her _that_?

"Have you ever cheated on an exam?" he repeated. She mustn't lie to him. She couldn't lie to him.

"No."

"Ever been tempted to?"

"No!"

"Have you ever shoplifted?"

"No."

"Ever been tempted to?"

"Once," she said, and was suddenly amazed at her own coherence. "A friend of mine did it, aged fifteen. Stole a bag from a shop. They had him up in court, and they had a string of teachers saying how well-behaved and clever he was, how successful he was going to be. And I thought, I thought, maybe if I did something like that, they'd say those things about me, wouldn't just take me for granted."

Sherlock smiled. "You're doing very well, Molly. Have another glass of wine."

***

After that there were only fragments. A peculiarly intense look on Sherlock's face as he asked: "Ever been tempted to kill your older brother?" Simple mathematical questions that she couldn't work out, even when she used her fingers. And the moment when Sherlock had reached out and held her shoulder for a moment, and said, in that infinitively seductive voice: "Tell me your answer, Molly. I need to know." She had a vague memory that that had been the question about her favourite fruit.

***

She woke up next morning in Sherlock's bed, and through the agony in her skull, gradually realised three things. That she was still fully dressed, apart from her shoes. That Sherlock was also fully dressed, sitting at a desk in the bedroom, writing. And that she was about to be very, very sick...

"Sherlock!" she moaned.

"Good, you're awake," said Sherlock, and in a quick movement he was beside the bed. With a bucket.

***

The efficient and impersonal way he held her till she'd stopped vomiting, and then gave her isotonic drinks and aspirin, told her, as if she needed to know, that he felt no desire for her. When she was finally able to sit up and focus, he said:

"Thank you for your help last night. I've got a couple of things for you before you go. The first is, well, call it a contribution towards your rent for the next couple of months. I've got quite a lot of research funds at the moment, and I think you've earned the money."

"Thank you," breathed Molly, when she saw the size of the cheque. This was turning into a bit of a fairy tale after all, if a rather strange one.

"And what's the other thing?"

"A transcript from last night. I want you to look through your answers and mark with a cross all the statements you wouldn't have made when sober. I've got to go now, so just let yourself out the flat when you've finished. And let me know if you want to see a copy of my final report."

***

Bizarrely, it wasn't what she'd said about her sex life that was most embarrassing, the statements she wanted to put a dozen crosses against. It was her attempt to sing her favourite song, because she couldn't remember the title. Either that or the moment when she'd told Sherlock that he had a beautiful soul.

***

The hangover faded soon, but not the shame. The fact that Sherlock knew _everything_ about her now. And the fact that she'd wanted Peter to realise something was happening, to ask where she'd spent the night, where the extra money had come from. But Peter hadn't noticed, and, after all, there was nothing for him to notice. Nothing had happened, and she didn't have the guts to tell Peter what she'd wanted to happen. She'd just gone back to hanging onto her marriage for a little longer, till – inevitably – Peter came up with a bright idea for his life that didn't involve her.

***

Why did I do it, Molly wondered. Why did I think I could sort out Peter and end up making things worse, hang on in there and just make us both more miserable? And now it was happening again with Harry: the first signs of the disaster to come. She'd always known it was going to be hard for Harry to stop drinking, that there might be relapses. But six bottles of whisky in a cupboard in the flat? That wasn't a lapse, that could only be Harry choosing to destroy herself.

Even then, she might have forgiven Harry, if she'd just told Molly the truth. Admitted what she'd done, that she needed help. But how could you help someone who just lied to you? A stupid, stupid lie about not knowing where the bottles had come from, as if some mysterious force from above had deposited the bottles in Harry's flat. Had Harry so little respect for her that she couldn't even be bothered to tell Molly a vaguely convincing story? Did she seem to Harry to be as soft a touch as that?

Or was Harry's brilliant, beautiful mind starting to crumble from the years she'd been poisoning it? Did she no longer _know_ what she was doing, had done? Choosing to destroy herself or already destroyed: whichever it was she couldn't bear to wait and see it happen. There was nothing she could do that would help, even if she did stay; the only sensible choice was to get out.


	2. Friday afternoon: Harry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Molly has walked out on Harry: it's no wonder Harry's even more confused than normal.

**Friday afternoon: Harry**

Molly had walked out last night, and Harry didn't know why. No, she knew why: because Molly had found a load of whisky hidden in Harry's flat. But she didn't know why the whisky was there. She couldn't remember; that was the real problem. She didn't think she'd bought the whisky, but she couldn't be 100% sure. And if she couldn't convince herself, how did she convince Molly? Molly had taken her confused denials themselves as a sign of drinking. But it wasn't drink that made Harry like this.

They'd called her dreamy as a child, when they weren't calling her a forgetful idiot. It was more that she was thinking about other, more interesting things. And there'd never been a time in her life when there weren't more interesting things to think about than where her coat was, or when she'd last eaten, or if somebody owed her money. She'd be the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, if she ever made it to professor. Not that making it to the end of next week currently looked possible. Molly had gone. Molly had gone. Why get up in the morning when Molly had gone? Why go to bed at night with no Molly to share it? Why eat, why work, why live?

Why live? She could hear John's voice in her head as she said that, his best 'don't be so bloody stupid, Harry' look on his face. You've been through break-ups before, you've survived them, you will survive this. Pick yourself and get on with living.

The imaginary John in her head was one thing, but the real John would be a lot better. But it wouldn't be fair to get John involved this time. He had enough problems of his own this weekend; he'd probably be haring off to the station right now. And besides, if she couldn't remember, and she couldn't be sure, John couldn't help her. There was something not just wrong, but mysteriously wrong here, and she needed someone who knew about mysteries.


	3. Friday afternoon: John

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Molly and Harry aren't the only ones having a fraught weekend.

It had all been going so well, John thought, until Mycroft stuck his oar in. Descended on the surgery in mid-March and decreed that Something (with a capital S) had to be done about the situation.

"About what?" asked John, presuming that this was somehow going to be connected with Libya.

"About the fact that Sherlock is refusing to take you to meet Mummy. Now he's saying he won't be going to Alnwick for Easter, either, having already missed Christmas. Do you realise, John, that it's now nearly a year since he's seen her?"

"I suppose it must be. He went up to see her last spring, didn't he? When I'd just come home from hospital after the swimming pool explosion." He suspected that it had been Mycroft who'd arranged that trip, so that Sherlock couldn't drag John off on a case too soon. Probably a sensible move, but it had been oddly quiet in the flat for the week Sherlock had been away. John had practically been talking to the skull by the time he got back.

"And since then," Mycroft said, "he's not visited her again. Ever since you and he became ...intimate."

"I know," said John. It had become plain a month or two after they had got together – had started sleeping together – that Sherlock had decided John and his mother were not going to meet. Ever. John hadn't enquired why. Why tended not to be a good question where Sherlock and his family were concerned.

"I've endeavoured to make Sherlock see sense, but I've had more success negotiating with EU commissioners," Mycroft announced. "So it's down to you, John. If Sherlock is not prepared to take you to meet Mummy, you need to go on your own."

"I'm not going behind Sherlock's back," John replied.

"I'm happy for you to tell him as soon as you're sure he can't stop you."

"Mycroft, do you have any idea about families?"

"About yours, do you mean? Your father's reaction to his illness. Harry coming out at Oxford. Ian Patterson. You and Clara. Do I need to go on?"

"OK, you know every skeleton in my closet," John replied crossly. "What I meant was, do you have any understanding of how families are supposed to behave? Or even couples?"

"I am, naturally, rather well-informed about the dynamics of my own family," Mycroft said, with complete composure. "Sherlock believes that if you meet our mother there will be an irreconcilable quarrel."

John waited for Mycroft to go on, but as normal he was being a melodramatic bugger.

"Have you thought of being less enigmatic?" John enquired at last. "I would like to finish up my paperwork and go home, not sit here playing guessing games. I am not going to have a bust-up with Sherlock about his mother. If I can put up with you, I can put up with any of his relatives. And Mrs Holmes may want to quarrel with me, but I'm surprisingly hard to quarrel with at times. Or is the idea that Sherlock will quarrel with his mother? But he obviously cares about her..."

He broke off. Mycroft sat, watching him. Sherlock, by this stage, would be calling John an idiot. Mycroft was probably just thinking it.

"Mrs Holmes is likely to say something so appalling to me that she and Sherlock will quarrel. That's what you're scared of, isn't it? So you want to get the worst out of the way beforehand. I'm the advance guard, am I? Right in the firing line."

"You don't shy away from danger," Mycroft replied, staring down at him. "The situation is becoming intolerable, and the deadlock needs to be broken. This is the obvious solution, given they're both so stubborn. I can only surmise that Sherlock's reluctance is owing to a rather touching wish not to expose you. Most unlike him, I might add."

"What do you want me to do?" John asked. "If I do agree, which I'm not yet sure I will."

"Go up and stay with her this weekend. Win her over."

"Just like that? And what if I don't?"

"I'll provide alternative accommodation for you if you need to make a hasty retreat. But I have every confidence in you. I'll arrange transport, of course. I do think the train might be best, the East Coast line isn't bad, and Mummy regards chauffeurs or helicopters as rather unnecessary extravagances. If I send you details of the train times, can you let me know which one would suit you?"

"What do I tell Sherlock and when?" John asked, and then realised he'd missed out the crucial qualifier: _If I do this._

"Say nothing until you're on the train. Your tickets will be delivered to the flat, so Sherlock will be able to deduce what's going on. But I suspect he won't mention it. I suggest if he asks where you're going for the weekend, you say you're going on pilgrimage to Lindisfarne."

Surely Mrs Holmes couldn't be worse than her sons, John thought, even allowing for heredity.

"OK," he said, "but when you send the itinerary, I need intelligence reports as well."

"What do you mean?" It was quite funny to have disconcerted Mycroft for once.

"You're sending me into hostile territory. I don't want to go blind. So I want the file on your mother. There must be one somewhere."

"No!"

My God, thought John, there are traces of decency in Mycroft after all. At the most inconvenient moments, of course.

"I'd make a better impression if I knew what her likes and dislikes were," he said cheerily.

"That would be _underhand_ ," said Mycroft, managing to sound like a particularly disapproving headmaster. You simply need to remember, John, that you are an officer and a gentleman."

"Yes, sir," said John. "Understood, sir. Permission to fall out, sir, I've got a load of stuff to sort out before Friday."

***

The quality of the silence at 221B for the next few days told John that Mycroft was right: Sherlock knew, but wasn't going to discuss the matter. John's nerve held till he was getting on the train on Friday afternoon, when he'd texted Sherlock instead of phoning him: 

 _Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye. Going to Alnwick, back Sunday. John_.

Then he'd switched off his phone. This was going to be hard enough without a twitchy Sherlock on his mobile. He hoped Mycroft was right, and he wasn't going to hash this up. Not with Sherlock - nothing was going to come between Sherlock and himself. But Sherlock's relationship with his mother getting even more wrecked was a distinct possibility. He'd seen enough bust-ups in his own family over who you fell for.

***

The bust-ups had all been Harry's fault, not his, he remembered, as the train raced up through the Midlands. Their parents had barely spoken to Harry for nearly three years after she'd come out, almost all her time at Oxford. But then he'd finally persuaded Mum, at least, to go to Harry's graduation ceremony, and she'd been so proud of her brilliant daughter she'd been in tears. Whereas he had not being crying, whatever Harry might have claimed afterwards. At the most, tears of laughter, at his sister bowing and scraping in her over-sized robes, like a dressed-up mouse.

He had cried though, when she'd broken up his engagement to Clara. Tears of rage and bitterness about her betrayal. He still didn't understand why Harry had done it. It made sense that she'd fallen for Clara, anyone would, but to seduce her like that, that was appalling. Harry must have talked Clara into sleeping with her, the way she'd talked so many girls into her bed before. And then she'd obviously talked Clara out of marrying John, and he still didn't know what lies she'd told her about him, or why Clara had been foolish enough to believe her. When he'd realised what Harry had done that weekend, it had been like one of those scenes in a horror film, where you walked up behind a friend, and suddenly they turned round and they were a monster about to attack you. He wasn't sure if he could ever trust Harry again.

He hadn't spoken to Harry for months, years, centuries, after that. Well, eighteen months or so. He'd have been justified in never speaking to her again; she'd damn near broken his heart. Even if he had realised after a while that his heart had somehow mended again, that there were girls other than Clara he fancied. And he'd started to miss his bloody little idiot of a sister, a Harry-shaped hole in his life. It just wasn’t the same without ridiculous e-mails telling him things he didn't want to know about eighteenth-century criminals. Warily, he’d got back into contact with her, wondering if there was any solid ground there, anything in Harry he could still rely on. Tried to put the past behind him, think of her behaviour as a crazy one-off lapse of judgement.

And somehow it had _helped_ when Harry and Clara had finally got together, a few years later. It had been weird, of course, but good as well, because he could tell himself then that it had all been meant to be. That Harry had seduced Clara because she had somehow known that Clara was right for her, not John. Harry _needed_ Clara in a way that he would never have done, and now at last his sister was finally settling down with someone sweet, good for her.

The thing with Harry, though, was that she couldn't stay sane, sensible: there was some impulsive, destructive streak within her. She had an ideal job as a lecturer, she had Clara, they had a nice house, so what did she do? Become an alcoholic and then walk out on Clara. Admittedly, he had already told Clara to leave Harry, once he'd realised what was going on. He supposed that had been disloyal to Harry, but he'd known what was going to happen. He'd seen people destroy themselves with drink before now.

But Harry had surprised him yet again, hadn't she? She'd somehow managed to get herself dried out and in a relationship with Molly Hooper, of all bizarre people. Sober for nearly six months now. It was an absolute miracle.

An announcement came over the PA system: there were minor delays expected due to signalling problems. He was tempted to phone Harry while they were waiting. She could at least give him a few bizarre facts about the history of Northumbria to scatter into his conversation.  Might even be worth asking what to expect from someone like Mrs Holmes. Every now and then, in between all the academic rubbish Harry talked about class and gender and psychology, she could occasionally say something quite shrewd about people.

No, he decided, phoning her would be a daft idea. Harry and Molly would probably be rushing around getting ready to go out somewhere tonight, and if he turned his phone on, Sherlock would start bombarding him with texts. Time enough to speak to Sherlock when he'd avoided screwing the weekend up.  



	4. Friday afternoon: Sherlock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry's broken up with Molly, and she needs help from _somebody_.

Sherlock looked at the text, sighing. Trust this to turn up when John was away.

 _Broken up with Molly. I may be mad. Please help. HarWat_

He texted back quickly:

 _Relate for the first. Psychiatrist for the second. I'm neither. SH_

He settled down for a long argument. Harry never took no for an answer. But even so, he was surprised by the next text:

 _Need you to deduce if I'm mad. Can't work it out myself. HarWat_

Now _that_ , he thought, was a text worth investigating. Harry's problem was almost certainly trivial, but there was something about Harry herself that he still found intriguing.

***

When he got to her flat, she could barely talk, which suggested something seriously wrong. It took all of Sherlock's patience to extract the facts from her.

"So last night," he said at last, "Molly found six bottles of whisky in a cupboard in the living room of your flat. Bottles that you have no memory of purchasing."

"And Molly has left m-me, because she thinks I'm drinking again."

"But you said the bottles were unopened."

"Going to drink again. She...I couldn't say anything. I didn't know, I can't remember. Am I m-m-mad?"

"I need more facts before I answer that. The human mind is strange. So I need to see the bottles and then your bank statements. Do you know where either of them are?"

"The bottles are down here." Harry gestured  vaguely. "The finance stuff is in the filing cabinet in the corner. All sorted out n-n-neatly by M-M-M..." Harry's voice died out, and she collapsed in a chair. "I'm sorry," she added, as Sherlock picked up a bottle, "this break-up is killing me."

"Go in the bedroom and lie down," he replied. "You're miserable and it's distracting me."

***

Thanks to Molly's organisation, it didn't take him long. And it was going to be an interesting case after all, because if it wasn't Harry who'd put the bottles there – and he was sure now it wasn't – who had done? He just needed to check one or two more details, he might even be able to get everything wrapped up tonight. But when he went to find Harry, she was curled up in bed, asleep. He hadn't the heart...no, he had the sense not to wake her, because she'd be too dopey to appreciate his brilliance. She must be exhausted, he thought, to fall asleep like that.

He hurried away from the flat, clutching a plastic bag full of the bottles.  Evidence, of course, but it was also important to stop Harry doing anything even more stupid. His memories of watching her detox last year were still vivid, the sheer misery of it for her both her and John. He vaguely felt that he ought to be doing something more, comforting Harry in some way: was that what John would want him to do? But that was not his area at all: better to stick to proving Harry's innocence.

***

In the long ago days BW (Before the Watsons) Sherlock's life had all been so much simpler,  he found himself thinking in the taxi home. You couldn't have your relationships break up messily - like Harry's always did - if you never got into them in the first place. And that was the logical thing to do, because people, other people, were almost all stupid or nasty or both. Even the few non-stupid, non-nasty people he'd seen became so once they got entangled in a sexual relationship. The harsher side of his mother's character had been emphasized by her marriage. And Mrs Hudson, though she was far shrewder than she appeared, had been taken in for a long time by the malignantly nasty Joseph Hudson.

So when the unlikely event had occurred, and he'd met John, who was moderately bright and kind, and foolishly loyal, he'd known better than to try and complicate the matter with sexual activity. John might possibly enjoy that – he suspected John slept with men occasionally, given the condom brands he bought – but Sherlock certainly wouldn't. But he did study John particularly carefully, try and work out why he was the way he was. What pleased him, displeased him. Which inevitably, had brought up the issue of Harry.

Harry had been oddly hard to deduce – other than the obvious aspects of her being an alcoholic lesbian with a failed marriage - because John said so little about her. Sherlock had also realised that looking through John's possessions or e-mails got John unnecessarily worked up about privacy. So he had to wait until the evening in February when John had reluctantly gone off to meet Harry to discuss some of the practicalities of the divorce. Harry was incompetent, presumably, as well as being stupid and/or nasty (because John wasn't stupid or nasty and yet found her so hard to deal with). It had only seemed like kindness to find an excuse for John to leave the pub early, text him a message...

***

 **February 2010**

 _Come at once. Urgent problem. SH_

 _John's busy. Who are you and what's your problem? HarWat_

 _Sherlock, and you shouldn't play with that phone, Harry. It's not yours any more. SH_

 _I hear you play with it all the time. And that's not all you play with of John's. HarWat_

 _Where's John? SH_

 _Toilets. Been a long time. Perhaps he's having an argument with a condom machine? HarWat_

 _Why would he? SH_

 _You tell me, Sherlock. So what's your problem? HarWat_

 _I'm bored._

 _You're boring._

 _You're drunk, Harry. SH_

 _Yes, but I may be sober in the morning. But if you're bored *I* can help. HarWat_

 _How? SH_

 _Tell you about the solar system._

 _Not interested. SH_

 _Tell you what Simon Sherlock was found guilty of in 1727 HarWat_

 _More interested. SH_

 _Sherlock, don't encourage Harry. Leave us alone please. Phone will be switched off as from NOW. JHW_

***

By the time John returned, his stomach doubtless aching from mediocre food eaten under stress, Sherlock was a lot better informed about Dr Harriet Watson of King's College London.

"They shouldn't let Harry loose with a mobile phone," John announced, as he walked in, and plonked himself down onto his chair. "You know what, they shouldn't let her communicate with anyone at any point. Maybe an order of Trappist nuns would calm her down."

"Surely she'd seduce them all, in between undermining their faith? She strikes me as intellectually formidable. And why didn't you tell me she was a historian of crime?"

"I presumed you'd deduced that," said John. "In fact, I presumed you'd worked out everything you needed to know about my family within a week of meeting me."

"I had Harry down as something in IT, given the way she can still text accurately when drunk. Though I suppose I was partly right. She's been heavily involved in setting up the Old Bailey trials database, hasn't she? Which is how she 'd heard of a man called Simon Sherlock who was transported for stealing lead plate. No connection to my family, as far as I can tell."

"Oh God," John replied. "You're a Baileyite, aren't you? I should have guessed."

"What?"

"It's what Harry calls them. The amateurs who spend hours on the site, and want to read it at the weirdest times. The staff try to do updates at 2 a.m., and get complaints that they're thwarting someone's research. And they allegedly had a number of users on Christmas Day."

"I've never used it on Christmas Day," Sherlock retorted. No need to mention how much of Boxing Day he'd spent tracking patterns of theft. "But I have looked at it on occasions; it has some fascinating material. Why isn't your sister's name given as one of the contacts?"

"They removed her details after an...incident," said John.

"What happened?"

"She had a horrendous e-mail argument with someone about indexing, and she was barred from any direct contact with users of the database. And yes, that is what my sister is like. She can have a quarrel about indexing. She is more argumentative than you would believe possible, and she has absolutely no common sense. If you want to know about the eighteenth century, she's wonderful. If you want to know whether she's eating properly, or what her bank balance is, she's hopeless."

"I must meet her."

"No! She's a drunken mess who's wrecking her own life and everyone else's."

"She can't be in that bad a state if she's still publishing."

"The drinking's intermittent. When she's got a project on, she can just about stay sober. When it finishes, or something else goes wrong with her life, she gets hammered every night."

"Why don't you get on with her?"

"Because she's a drunken mess and wrecks people's lives."

"You told me you'd never got on with her. So, what was the problem before the drinking?"

John sighed. "She talks far too much, she's completely tactless, and she's cleverer than me and knows it. And just completely maddening in a little sister sort of way. Oh, and she also broke up my engagement. By sleeping with my fiancée."

"You were engaged?" He'd presumed that John's relationship failures all came fairly early on.

"To Clara. You were right about that one as well."

"But Harry didn't get together with Clara then, did she?"

"No, it must have been five or six years later, just came out of the blue. But how did you work that one out?"

"You said once that Harry and Clara had been together for nearly seven years, but you were planning to marry Clara. That's a young man's mistake, mid-20s. You'd have had more sense by the time you were 30."

"It wasn't a mistake!"

Sherlock should have realised that even John would get cross at this point, but someone needed to point out a few facts.

"Clara falls in love with a brilliant, impractical academic, and doesn't leave her even when she becomes an alcoholic. She's showering her with extravagant gifts and declarations of her love right till the end. Natural co-dependent, she'd have got bored with your self-reliance. Good job your sister broke it off, I'd have thought."

"Clara's a wonderful woman. You have no right to say things like that!"

It was interesting, Sherlock thought, how prone John was to putting women on pedestals. Explained a lot. But perhaps not something to bring up right now, especially as John's hand was already starting to shake.

"So did you tell her to leave Harry?" he asked instead. "As a doctor you'd have spotted the addiction early, I presume, and I can't see loyalty to Harry keeping you quiet."

"Yes, I did. Are you telling me that was wrong?"

"No, you were right, which means that Harry was too. Something seriously wrong with the marriage. Perhaps it was Clara driving Harry to drink?"

"Shut up!" John was on the point of storming off to his room, Sherlock thought, so he let the silence linger. Tried to look - not sympathetic, John wouldn't believe that – but at least innocuous.

"So why did Harry leave Clara?" he said quietly, at last.

"Because she's an idiot," John said wearily.

"Yes, but she's an academically-minded idiot. She'd have some superficially logical excuse."

"She _said_ it was hard to stop drinking when Clara always wanted a bottle of wine. Which is deeply unfair, because Clara's not a drinker, she's just sociable."

"Whereas Harry, one assumes, can't hold her liquor. Not helped, I presume by the fact that she's tiny?"

"She is actually. Five foot nothing and all skin and bones.  How did you know?"

It was handy that he could still distract John with deductions, Sherlock thought. "Heredity suggests below average height, as does the emphasis on her being your 'little' sister. Forgetting to eat suggests skinny. And that level of belligerence, she must be over-compensating for something. You know, John, one of these days I really must meet your vicious mouse of a sister."  



	5. Friday evening: Molly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Breaking up is always hard to do for both Molly and Harry. It affords Sherlock certain opportunities, however...

Molly remembered as she went home that Harry and she had been supposed to go to the cinema that evening, to see 'The Eagle'. They'd both read Rosemary Sutcliff as children, so Harry had agreed to go and see it, even though they knew it would be historically inaccurate, and dishy men in revealing armour didn't do anything for Harry. And afterwards, Molly thought, we'd have come back here, and Harry would have ranted about all the anachronisms, and I'd have told her that it didn't matter, because what the story's really about is loyalty, and bravery, and a very unlikely friendship.

Of course, she could still go and see the film, but it wouldn't be the same without Harry. When you were with Harry you saw things differently, the world became a whole mass of stories, histories. Everything had a past and you couldn't escape from the weight of that past. She wasn't sure she wanted to think about that right now.

But why should she sit at home and mope? She could meet up with some of her other friends and enjoy herself.  Without Harry. But how could she explain why Harry wasn't with her? Say she was away at a conference? (Her friends would think Harry was neglecting her). Finishing off a paper? (Ditto). Tired? (Drunk). Ill? (Ditto). In fact, whatever she said, her friends would presume the worst about Harry. Because they always presumed the worst about Molly's relationships. And they'd be right, just like they'd been right about Peter, and about Paul. And what was worse, they'd be sympathetic, in that smug 'told you so' way. Tactfully not saying that Molly had made another bad decision, fallen for another brilliant disaster area.

She couldn't face seeing anyone. She'd just lie in her bedroom for a bit, listen to a CD, that'd make her feel better. Lie on the bed where Harry and she had first made love. Which Paul Kablinski had bought, because he liked writing in bed. She should have got rid of it, but it was a very comfortable bed, spacious. And _that_ bit of the past didn't seem so important anymore.

She'd got over Paul, that was the thing. She could read the newspaper and see a review of one of his novels now and it barely hurt. Not that she'd ever buy a copy, and she did feel pleased when reviewers commented on how unsympathetic his heroes were. But it didn't matter the way it had once done. Not the way that Paul, everything about Paul, had once twisted her guts.

 **Molly Kablinski (2004-2007)**

She couldn't understand now why she'd ever fallen for Paul Kablinski. Because he wasn't Peter, she supposed. All her friends had presumed Paul was another hopeless drifter like Peter, thought his claims to be a writer were just an excuse to lounge around, sponge off Molly, now she was earning some money at last, as a junior doctor. But she'd seen the drive in Paul that Peter had never had. The force, the determination, that kept on getting the small, bespectacled, slightly grubby looking man what he wanted. First on his list had been Molly:  they'd got married three months after the party at which she'd met him. Then Paul had got a contract for his collection of short stories. And the final prize had been a year's writing fellowship in the States.

The first she'd known about _that_ had been Paul telling her he'd won it. And, of course, he told her, she was an independent woman. It wasn't for him to tell her how she squared this with her training as a pathologist. He was sure she'd work something out. The plan they'd agreed – her plan, which he'd nonchalantly accepted – was that he'd go over on his own, and see what the long-term prospects were in America, while she continued at Barts.

Five miserable months later, Sherlock had come back into her life.

***

She hadn't seen Sherlock since that drunken night four years ago. She'd doggedly avoided Queen Mary College for a while, and then learnt through a friend that she didn't need to. Sherlock had disappeared from the university; the rumour said due to drugs. But when he turned up again, as the world's only consulting detective, he looked clean to her now more experienced eyes. Clean, and beautiful, and not interested in discussing the past. Interested in her only because of her ever increasing access to corpses.

She became used to the way that Sherlock's manner towards her switched, depending on his current scientific needs. Intellectually used to it. Unfortunately, some deeply unrealistic part of her still couldn't help responding to his charm. Hoping, despite all the evidence, that he cared, would care, could care. She didn't tell him about Paul, but she knew she didn't need to. The Barts gossip network would see to that; he knew more than enough about her already.

***

She was never sure afterwards if it was chance, or if Sherlock had planned the whole thing. She'd been sitting in the canteen one lunchtime, thinking about Paul. Thinking, not crying. Then Sherlock's long-legged body had slid into the seat opposite her, and, after a cool gaze, he'd announced: "Why have you been crying?"

"I haven't," she said, futilely, because Sherlock's eyes flicked across the printout she was still holding.

"Unless Yale University's press releases have now achieved a previously unheard of emotive power, I take it that Mr Kablinski has obtained another job. Tears of sorrow, not of joy, of course. You justifiably prefer the thought of Barts' mortuary to the frustrations of the American Medical Licensing Examination."

"It's...it's just very sudden," she replied. "I haven't taken it in properly yet, that's all."

"He's a talented man your husband. I've read some of his stories," Sherlock said. "Of course, one of the factors you need to consider, when you're making plans, is whether he's cheating on you yet. I think he probably is, but I'd need to meet him to be 100% certain."

"He's not cheating on me!" she snapped.

"I told you, I've read his stories. And he married you only a few months after you met, didn't he? How long has he been on his own in the US now?"

"Paul's not like that!"

"I was wrong," said Sherlock smoothly. "I don't need to meet him after all. Because you know it already, don't you?"

"I don't know!" she gulped. How could he do this to her, reduce her to shreds with a few sentences? She wasn't even drunk this time. "I just don't know."

"That's because you see, but don't observe," Sherlock replied, smiling lazily at her. "Your husband  e-mails you regularly?"

"Yes. Not very much at first, because he said it distracted him from his writing, but then he got into the habit of sending me a long e-mail every Sunday evening, before he goes back to work..." Her voice tailed off.

"A long, cheery e-mail? The writing of a guilty man who's trying to cover up how he's spent the rest of the weekend? Carefully composed to sound good, but give away no details of his activities?"

"Yes," Molly whispered.

"Who is the female colleague he doesn't mention any more? I'm guessing it's someone on campus, easier to fit into his schedule, he's a busy man, but colleague, rather than student, because he's also ambitious, doesn't want to risk trouble."

"Dorothy Liu," she said, "And the novel he's working on includes a mixed-race marriage." It was at that point that she started to cry again.

Sherlock listened for nearly an hour as she sobbed her heart out about Paul. At one point he even held her hand. His long fingers were cool, surprisingly soft to the touch. The small part of Molly that could observe as well as see knew it meant he had a particularly outrageous request to make, that she'd pay a high price for this kindness. Even as the rest of her thought: he wouldn't be trying to break up my marriage if he wasn't just a bit concerned about me, interested in me.

"What should I do?" she asked, when she'd finally ground to a halt.

"Leave him," Sherlock replied. "But you won't. Nor will you give up your job and follow Mr Kablinski to America. You're not quite that stupid. You'll try and save your marriage by e-mail and hasty transatlantic visits. I'd give you a 12% estimate of success, and that's a generous estimate." He smiled then, and the hypnotic warmth crept back into his voice. "But all that's for later. You know what you should do right now?"

"What?"

"Find me a corpse with bad teeth, lots of dental work."

***

Sherlock was right, of course, he almost always was. Paul Kablinski with Dorothy Liu in the Department of Anthropology. And after two years and several attempts at reconciliation, it had been Paul Kablinski with Maria Flores in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and he'd sent _her_ the divorce papers. It was no comfort at all that Sherlock had been wrong on the precise effect of microwaving a severed head with multiple fillings in it.

***

Why had it taken her so long to learn that some men, some _people_ would always let you down, Molly thought. That if you trusted them, gave them what they asked for, it would always end in tears? Peter and Paul and Sherlock and Jim and now Harry. Why hadn't she seen the warning signs about what Harry was going to do? There must have been _something_ that would have told her what Harry was planning, if she'd only observed it properly.

Still, if she'd survived Paul Kablinski, she told herself firmly, switching off the CD player, she could survive anything. Even breaking up with Harry. And now was the time to prove it: she would go and see 'The Eagle' on her own. At least she knew that Marcus and Esca would have a happy ending.  



	6. Friday evening: Harry

When Harry woke she found her flat empty. No Molly – no, of course not. No Molly, no more. But no Sherlock either, just a scrawled note:

 _Think you're in the clear, but need to check the bottles. Don't panic. Sherlock_

She wasn't going to panic. She was way beyond panic now, lodged firmly in despair, because Molly wasn't coming back. Thank God Sherlock had taken the bottles, and that she didn't have to go anywhere tonight. She could stay in the flat, where there was nothing to drink, because if she went out, she would end up drunk. Within five minutes walk there were nine places she could buy alcohol; she could still list them all. And the one thing that had been useful from the alcohol counselling had been the triggers mnemonic : HALT. You are most liable to relapse when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired.

She couldn't concentrate, which made it harder. It was an effort just to cook herself some pasta, eat it, wash up. As for the rest of the evening, whatever was in front of her eyes or in her ears - books, a DVD, Radio 4 - it didn't matter. All she could do was think of Molly, turn the whole thing over and over in her mind. How had it happened, why had it happened? There were people who told you not to dwell on the past when you had a break-up. Unfortunately, it was completely unrealistic advice for a historian. She couldn't stop analysing the past just because it was her own past.

The arguments, the counterfactuals pressed in on her. Could she have prevented this happening? Was it inevitable that Molly would leave her? What if Molly hadn't found the whisky? But if the whisky had been there – and the whisky had been there, that was the one definite fact – then someone would have found it eventually. And it was no good saying 'what if the whisky hadn't been there?' because she didn't know why it was there.

She wouldn't have broken up with Molly if she'd never met Molly in the first place. Would that have been better? _'Tis better to have loved and lost: Than never to have loved at all.' Discuss, with examples._ Molly had been the reason for her to stop drinking, and now she was probably going to be the reason for her to start drinking again...

No, she mustn't think like that. She was choosing not to drink, whether or not she was with Molly. She could have made that decision at any time, even if John and Sherlock hadn't taken her to Molly's birthday party last August. Molly had only been the final piece in her decision to give up alcohol, one cause among many.

She wouldn't have needed to give up alcohol if she'd never become an alcoholic in the first place. If she'd only known when to stop, if she hadn't done so many stupid things. Like marrying Clara. If it had been John marrying Clara, not her, would it all have worked out? He wouldn't have become an alcoholic. And maybe if he'd been married he wouldn't have risked his neck out in Afghanistan. If she'd just got it right all those years ago, hadn't screwed up both their lives...

But, no, John being with someone didn't stop him risking his neck. He enjoyed the risks, enjoyed chasing criminals with Sherlock; he was happy doing that. But if it hadn't been for Mike Stamford introducing him to Sherlock...

That was the terrifying thought: the sheer randomness of events. _For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail._ John and she had both seemed doomed last winter. Her without Clara, killing herself bottle by bottle in her lonely flat, barely able to function anymore. And John limping round London like a sun-tanned ghost.

But somehow John had survived; Sherlock had given him back hope. Given him more, as well, when she'd pushed him after the swimming pool bomb. It was comforting to think about John and Sherlock, because that had worked out, that was good, that was solid, even if her own life was crumbling away, the way it always seemed to do. If she just had the chance to go back, to get things right this time. If she just had her own personal time machine. But however far she went back she was still herself, and wouldn’t she just make the same mistakes over and over again? How did she escape from who she was?

 _Running away won’t solve anything, Harry._ Who had told her that? Oh, John, of course, when he’d been trying to stop her drinking. John didn’t run anyway from anything, even when it would be sensible to. Which was stupid, but why she loved him. She wished she had her big brother here with her right now, to sort her out, put some steel in her backbone.

But he was off on his own again, facing the unknown risks of Northumberland. It had been wild country up there once, she remembered, home of the border reivers. Men and women who made their own law, paid no attention to the conventions of normal life. She hoped it wasn't quite like that anymore.


	7. Friday evening: John

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From London to Alnwick, the Watsons are really not have a good weekend...

It was half-past eleven before the train limped into Alnmouth, and nearly midnight before John got to Threeways Farm. It wasn't a farm anymore, but it was still set at the end of a long muddy path. But he'd remembered to bring a torch and Mycroft had warned him that he needed to go round the side, not try and get in the front door.

Mycroft hadn't, of course, told him anything useful about who or what was inside the farm. Whether it was a haunted house, and if so haunted by whom? He was fairly sure that Mrs Holmes was a widow, although divorcee was an outside option. And she had to be rich and posh and keen on rural life. But she could be anything from a duchess to the local witch. Or just possibly both. Still, no use worrying about the possibilities in advance. Time for action. 

When he knocked, there were two different pitches of hysterical barking from inside, so he wasn't entirely surprised that when the door was finally opened, something shot out and tried to lick his face. A dopey, gangly beauty that could only be a red setter. He fended it off determinedly, hoping as he did so that he wouldn't accidentally tread on the small dog yapping loudly in the darkness at his feet. Then he smiled politely at the tall, thin, gray-haired woman who was now staring at him critically from the doorway. She opened her mouth and announced: "Sit! Stay!"

Her voice was so commanding, he had the momentary urge to obey himself. The dogs – the other was probably a Jack Russell  – subsided. He stuck out his hand; the woman didn't look the kissing type. More like someone who could rule half of Northumberland with a rod of iron. Still, he was her guest, wasn't he? She couldn't hang him up in a torture chamber immediately.

"I'm John Watson," he said. "I'm sorry I'm so late, Mrs Holmes, I hope you got my messages."

"Please call me Grace," she said, with an unexpectedly warm smile that reminded him shockingly of Sherlock. "You had engine failure, I gather?"

"Yes. I'm not quite sure how they fixed it, but I suspect sellotape and string was involved."

"You must be exhausted. Come in," she said. "Have you had something to eat? Don't mind Barney and Amber, they don't bite. Well, Barney can give you a bit of a nip, but he's too small to do much harm. Do you like dogs?"

"Yes," he said, and gave Amber a quick pat, at which she tried to lick his ear. "I've eaten on the train, thank you very much."

"Down!" said Mrs Holmes - probably to Amber. "Then I'll just show you to your room. You're in the blue bedroom, it's quite comfortable and it's got an en-suite."

He'd been half-expecting one of those ancient bathrooms where you couldn't get hot water after 10 o'clock at night without a month's notice.

"That would be lovely, Mrs...Grace."

"Follow me then, it's just at the back, so the scullery staircase is easiest." She led him through several large and dimly lit corridors and rooms, while he concentrated on memorising the route. The blue bedroom was extremely blue, but it had a radiator and what looked like a very comfortable bed.

"Thank you so much," he said, "I'll be fine now." What on earth had Sherlock been panicking about? Why had he let his own imagination run riot?

"Breakfast's at eight," she said, smiling. She turned to go, and then suddenly looked round at him again. "I must say," she added, in her firm, bright, upper class voice, "you don't _look_ like a poof."

 _Oh shit_ , he thought, as she disappeared along the landing.

***

Of course, thought John, as he started to unpack, if he was more like Sherlock, he'd have had a snappy comeback: "Do your research, please, Mrs Holmes. I'm not a poof, I'm bisexual." But in his experience, that was really not something it was a good move to talk about.

Which was why, of course, it had been Harry who'd used the term to him first, because you could always trust Harry to aim for accuracy over tactfulness. It had been when he'd come home for the holidays the first Easter of medical school, full of plans for what he and Ian Patterson were going to do in the summer. Harry had listened to him surprisingly patiently, and then abruptly asked:

"John, do you think you're bisexual?"

"What on earth are you going on about now?"

"You're in love with Ian, aren't you? You can't stop talking about him, and when you're talking about him, you're so thrilled. Like you were with Janice and then Katy Forester. So m-maybe you're bisexual, which means-"

"I know what it means, thank you. Whereas you have no idea what you're talking about." She was seventeen, and she was still such a child, even though she thought she knew everything.

"I read a book-" Harry protested.

"Yes, of course you did. Real life, Harry, is not like books."

"I read a book," Harry said doggedly, "about Alexander the Great. He had a wife, several wives, but the p-person he really loved was Hephaestion, one of his generals. Just because you fancy women, sleep with women, it doesn't m-mean you can't fall in love with a m-man."

"I'm not in love with Ian. We're friends, I admire him."

"You have a photo of him with his arm around you."

"He was being annoying. Made a change from him making bunny ears in photos."

"So why did you keep that one?" She grinned up at him in triumph, and he'd lost his temper then.

"Harry, maybe you should spend less time fantasising about my love life," he'd retorted, "and more sorting out your own. If you took your nose out of a book and dressed up a bit, you could get yourself a boyfriend. Or at least some friends."

She didn't say anything, just walked away, but he knew she was near crying. He'd apologised the next day, but it was a long time till he could get the conversation out of his head, however much he'd tried.

***

She'd been right, that was the stupid thing, he had ended up sleeping with Ian, even if their relationship hadn't lasted long. And then he'd gone back to dating women, partly because it was simpler. It had hardly encouraged him to explore the other side of his sexuality when he'd seen how his parents reacted to Harry coming out.

Harry, of course, had gone the whole hog, and come out at Oxford the first time she'd slept with a woman. Well, after also rapidly giving herself an entire crash-course in gay literature. She was probably the least sexually experienced and the best-read lesbian in the whole of Oxford, and definitely the most irritating. Harry's conversation had been alarming enough when she was a virgin, to John's way of thinking. It was absolutely terrifying once she was interested in sex as well as politics, religion and the meaning of life.

He should have been more sympathetic to Harry back then, shouldn't he? He'd tried his best, but he hadn't properly understood what it was like to be on the receiving end of that sort of prejudice. So what would Harry do faced with Mrs Holmes? He felt sure if he phoned her, she'd give him a detailed lecture on five possible approaches to dealing with homophobia, with helpful historical examples.

Oh God, he was being ridiculous, wasn't he? He could sort this out for himself, he didn't need Harry's help. And she would be fast asleep by now, anyhow. In fact, what he needed to do was to go to bed, because it was past midnight and he was shattered. Time enough to deal with Mrs Holmes in the morning.


	8. Friday evening: Sherlock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So far this weekend, Molly's trying to console herself with dishy men in revealing armour after her break-up with Harry, Harry is endeavouring not to hit the bottle, and John is facing the very ungracious Grace Holmes. But Sherlock has a case to solve, so he's happy...

Once he'd got back to 221B Sherlock examined the bottles, and it didn't take long for the fingerprints to confirm his deductions, although the plaster dust evidence was irritatingly inconclusive. Then he headed back to Vauxhall to talk to some of Harry's neighbours. Inconvenient to retrace his steps, but you had to take these things logically, work out all the angles. Which also meant, he suddenly realised, ensuring that Harry was...dealt with. He hastily typed out a text to her:

 _You're in the clear. Still tracking down the real culprits. Don't do anything rash till I get back to you. SH_

He sent the message and hoped it would have some effect. Bad enough having John away, still worse if he had to tell him when he got home that his sister had fallen off the wagon. Harry was dangerously stupid sometimes. The first time he'd ever seen her, in fact, was out cold in a hospital bed.

***

 **March 2010**

John had got the message the previous night: Harry had broken her arm in a fall, and would need surgery.  Sherlock had turned up at the hospital the next afternoon, and decided that he wasn't going to get John doing anything useful for a while. It was only then that he paid any attention to the small figure in the bed beside John's chair.

He promptly did a double take and then meticulously catalogued the way the sleeping Harry was not simply a smaller, younger version of John. Her hair was a lighter blonde even without the dye, the nose narrower, the jaw line less firm than John's, and their ear lobes were completely different.

"I ought to go and phone Clara," John said. "Could you, would you mind staying here?"

"All right," he said. "Don't be too long. Some coffee would be good."

Harry stirred three minutes after John had gone. He wondered at the time if it was deliberate – he hadn't realised then about Harry's innately poor sense of timing. There was a lot of groaning, and muttering, and then she demanded loudly:

"Oh God, why are anaesthesia hangovers so bloody awful?"

Sherlock said nothing. He didn't have much of a bedside manner at the best of times.

Harry's eyes – a lighter grey than John's – opened, and she gazed at him dopily. "And who the hell are you?"

"Don't you recognise me from John's description?"

"Haven't got m-my glasses on. John didn't say anything about tall, thin blurs. But if you're p-playing guessing games with a sick woman, you must be Sherlock." She closed her eyes, and slumped back at that point, as if she'd lost interest. He wished John would come back.

"Where's John?" she said, abruptly opening her eyes again.

"How do you know he's not here without your glasses?"

"I know what shape blur he is. Could tell him anywhere. Is he OK?"

"Yes."

"You're here, thought he m-m-might be in hospital too. Dead, dying." She sounded curious, more than concerned. Groggy from the anaesthesia still, he thought.

"Why would he be dead?" he demanded.

"If you got him killed. Do you think you could try n-not to, p-please? Be stupid if he got through Afghanistan and some crook killed him here."

"It'd help him if you didn't do things like this."

"Not my fault. A bollard attacked me."

"A bollard?"

"Sneaked up behind m-me, tripped m-me up. A bastard bollard. Can you find it and get it arrested, p-please, Sherlock?"

"Why should I?"

"Because you don't kn-know who it's going to attack next. Serial killer in the m-making."

"Are you still drunk?" he demanded.

"Wish I were. The operation would've been quicker then. Robert Liston could amputate someone's leg in 28 seconds. N-not sure if he got them drunk first."

Another long silence followed. John fighting a drinks machine, possibly, but Clara having hysterics slightly more likely. Outside possibility of John having found a medical emergency to assist at.

"Do m-m-me a favour," Harry said abruptly.

"What?"

"Get m-me a drink. Vodka would be best."

"Why should I?"

"So I don't have to ask John. Because I n-n-need it."

"You want it. Different thing."

"You're a sod, Sherlock!"

"I see you're getting to know one another," said John, reappearing with a couple of plastic cups. "Harry, Clara will be coming in this evening, so please try and behave nicely then. You do not need any alcohol, and you do not need, right now, to be yelling at Sherlock. Sherlock, can you go off and pick-pocket Lestrade, because Harry has to rest before she's in a fit state to argue properly."

"Sherlock," Harry asked, "what do you do when John's being boringly sensible?"

"Blow things up in the kitchen."

"That's stupid. Destructive. You should try kissing him instead. I have it on expert authority that he's a very good kisser."

"Harry, can you please shut up," John demanded, "and Sherlock, can you please go." He sounded exhausted. He didn't, however, deny that he was a very good kisser. Not that that was relevant data, of course, to Sherlock.  



	9. Saturday: Molly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

She'd go shopping, Molly decided, a bit of retail therapy would cheer her up. Spend a day looking at clothes, make-up, shoes. The sort of girly thing Harry really didn't enjoy.

The problem was that while everything reminded Molly of Harry, the thing that reminded her most about her was London itself. Harry _knew_ London. Not in the same way Sherlock did, every alleyway mapped and logged; to Harry, London was an old friend. She'd see a street name, a tube station and the stories would start pouring out. When Molly had told her she lived in Colliers Wood, Harry had promptly started discussing the Surrey Iron Railway and its horse-powered trains. Harry's voice was there in Molly's head at the Tube stations: Tooting Bec (the Norman abbey); Stockwell ("I got a tour of the  archives in the old air-raid shelter there once. M-miles of tunnels"; Charing Cross (Queen Eleanor and that anti-Semitic bastard Edward I); Oxford Circus (John N-Nash's dream of London vistas). Molly couldn't get away from Harry. She wasn't sure yet if she wanted to. Harry had changed everything.

***

 **Molly and Harry (August 2010)**

The first time Molly had met Harry, she'd been talking about London. Arguing about it, with Sherlock. And it had been wonderful, someone finally calling Sherlock's bluff, showing he didn't know everything after all. She'd probably fallen in love with Harry right then. Dr Harriet Watson, a kitten with the heart of a lion and the brains of...an extremely bright kitten. She was funny and wonderful and hopeless, and she'd gone after Molly with the desperate romantic lust that Molly had previously associated with sensitive fifteen year-old boys. She clearly wasn't an unsuitable man, and after their first time in bed Molly had almost been willing to put her top of her first ever list of suitable women. She'd taken Harry back to 221B, and Sherlock had been there, and she'd grinned at him, because he hadn't expected her and _Harry_ to get together, had he?

Except that they weren't going to get together, not properly, because Harry was an alcoholic. Molly hadn't been able to stop thinking about Harry after that night, but she'd stayed clear of her. She'd learnt her lesson about making the wrong choices.

***

The problem, Molly realised after a hot and noisy hour and a half in the crush of Oxford Street, was that she was the sort of woman who didn't just make mistakes, but made the same mistake over and over again. Like wanting to wear stiletto heels, even when she knew they'd just end up making her back ache. But they looked so good and they stopped men towering over her. (It was oddly satisfying that Harry was even shorter than her, but she wasn't thinking about Harry, was she?) She'd found the perfect pair of black ankle strap pumps, but after she'd walked around the shop for a bit, she ended up telling the shop assistant no. They did make her legs look longer, but they really weren't practical. And she was practical about things, wasn't she? She needed to be. 


	10. Saturday: Harry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the going gets tough, the less tough have hysterics in the British Library...

**10) Saturday: Harry**

Even though the British Library wasn't Harry's all-time favourite – she was still a Radcliffe Camera girl at heart – its solidity was always reassuring, that feeling that it would be there for her unchanged for the next hundred years if she needed it. But even that didn't help at the moment. She had to get out of the reading room, she decided abruptly. You got muttered comments if your phone so much as rang in there; she didn't dare imagine the complaints there'd be if you had a full-blown nervous breakdown. And if she got tears on the books she'd reserved, she'd probably be barred for life.

She ended up sitting in a toilet cubicle, weeping, which at least meant she had enough tissues. And if she went outside, she'd end up in the restaurant, with some wine. She'd always found that helped her get over a messy break up. What was that old joke? _She tried to drown her sorrows and found they could swim_. She could barely remember the week in November after she'd left Clara. She'd even missed giving a lecture, which she'd never done before. She didn't dare start again. Because if drinking made her feel better about Molly having gone, why should she ever sober up?

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Other people could drink and not lose control, know when to stop. She'd been able to do so once, before she and Clara had got together. Before Clara had turned Harry into...no, stop. It was not Clara's fault that Harry was an alcoholic. It was her own fault that she had made the wrong decisions. Time after time. Starting with getting together with Clara.

If you looked at the _longue durée_ , you could say that her sleeping with Clara hadn’t been so significant. Yes, it had broken up John’s engagement, but it would probably have ended in disaster anyway, given Clara’s hang-ups. And it had wrecked Harry and John’s relationship, but not irreparably. In the scale of stupid things she’d done, it couldn’t therefore take pride of place. The irretrievably stupid thing she’d done was get together with Clara five years later.

***

 **2002**

There was a whole historical debate on the extent to which events were best attributable to cock-ups rather than conspiracies. Certainly Harry’s biggest disasters had all occurred when she'd had good intentions. Like going off on a research trip to see a historical document in Buckinghamshire.

She’d studied the letter she’d received with interest  – an eighteenth-century manuscript in someone’s private collection - but as she read on, it sounded less promising. The diary of a young lady living in late Georgian Buckinghamshire might have useful material for local history, but it was a long way from her own interests. Eighteenth-century women were not all the same.  She wondered if she should agree to go down and see the manuscript, or if there was someone better to suggest. And then she saw the signature, and knew that she had to find out how Clara Wickham was getting on now.

Five years on from being a clumsy, nerdy PhD student, Harry was a clumsy, nerdy lecturer. Clara had grown up in five years. She was officially a PA, but Harry suspected she was really running the reinsurance brokers she was working for. Harry had remembered Clara vaguely as big and dark-haired and worried, but there was a new poise and grace in her subtly-slimmed down beauty now. And she had clearly come out with style.

Harry had looked through the manuscript with as much enthusiasm as possible, but it had become evident to her very quickly that Maria Wickham had been a deeply dull woman leading a deeply dull life, no hidden genius forced to flower unseen. Harry had come primed, though, able to explain clearly to Clara who would be interested, and how to contact them.

"I’m sorry," Clara had said, "I probably shouldn’t have asked you, but I don’t know much about history. And when I was looking up possible people on the internet, I saw your name and I...," Clara’s confident tone had lost a little of its sheen, "I wanted to find out how you were getting on."

"Still a historian," Harry said, "But not Oxford anymore. I’ve just started as a lecturer at King’s College London. Hard work, but very interesting."

"Dr Harriet Watson, that’s very impressive."

"Yeah, but I’m n-not a real doctor. N-not like-," Harry broke off abruptly, but Clara’s voice was smooth as she replied:

"How is John? Tom decided he wasn’t cut out for army life very early on, but did John stick it out?" Tom had been the brother, hadn't he, Harry remembered, who had encouraged John to join the army in the first place. Why the hell wasn't he fighting when John was?

"He’s in the Royal Army M-M-Medical Corps. He’s deployed out in Afghanistan at the m-moment."

"You must be very proud," said Clara. "And a bit worried as well."

"M-mostly worried," said Harry, "He’s not on the front line, but even so..."

"Some of my friends are out there as well. They’ve told me quite a lot. They know what they’re doing, they know it’s important. If you ever want someone to talk about things, or if I can help in any way, please let me know."

"I wouldn’t want to bother you," she replied hastily. "You must be very busy."

"I’ve always got time for you. In fact," Clara said, smiling graciously, "I really ought to be thanking you for the difference you made to my life."

"I m-m-made a difference?" said Harry. "You m-mean breaking up your engagement?"

"Showing me what a mistake I was making. Listening to me, treating me like I mattered. I realised that weekend that I couldn't just drift through life, doing what other people wanted. The first thing I did that was me thinking about what _I_ wanted, was sleeping with you."

"I shouldn’t have done it," said Harry, "It was a horribly m-messy way for you to break up."

"I didn’t mean to hurt John," Clara said, and there was a sadness to her sweetness now, that reminded Harry abruptly of five years ago. "But I didn’t know how to explain what had happened. And I still wasn’t sure whether I was a lesbian or not. I just knew, absolutely knew, that John couldn’t make me happy, and I couldn’t make him happy. So I had to break up with him, and I had to do it quickly, before I lost my nerve. I just said something silly about realising we were incompatible, I didn’t say about...you didn’t tell him, did you?"

"No," said Harry, "but he guessed." John had put two and two together after Clara broke off the engagement and got 3.999 recurring.  Given he was right about what Harry had done, trying to explain why she'd done it wouldn't have helped, would have seemed like a pathetic excuse. Even once he'd started speaking to her again, it had been too much of a risk to try and talk about that night.

"I’m sorry about that," said Clara, "It must have been awkward for you. But I’m sure he found somebody else. Is he married yet? I always thought John would settle down early, he’s that type."

"N-no," said Harry, "He doesn’t seem to have m-much luck with women." Really not the time to say maybe he'd be better going back to men.

"I know the feeling," said Clara cheerily. "I came out properly a few years ago, but I don't seem to have had any luck finding someone, something that will last. The girls I mostly know either just want to party, or end up coming out as bisexual, and then going off with City boys.  I just broke up with someone, in fact. I thought she was going to be the one, and then she fell for an Australian barmaid. Now I’m not quite sure what to do: find someone quickly to cheer me up, or keep looking for that grand romance."

"What happened?" said Harry, even though she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.

***   

 _Feminist ethics elementary examination_

 _You are a lesbian and you meet a beautiful woman you had a one-night stand with five years ago. She reveals that she recently split up with her girlfriend. Do you:_

 _a) Make polite conversation and then leave._

 _b) Let her pour out the details of her past love to you, make soothing noises and then get out of her life._

 _c) Let her pour out the details of her past love to you, make soothing noises, offer her comfort sex, and then get out of her life._

 _d) Let her pour out the details of her past love to you, make soothing noises, offer her comfort sex, and then get together with her for a quick and cheery affair._

 _e) Let her pour out the details of her past love to you, make soothing noises, offer her comfort sex, and then somehow end up convincing both of you that you were made for each other._

 _Answer: f) Don’t get yourself into this situation. And remember that you can do stupidly impulsive things even when you’re not hungry, angry, lonely, or tired._

***

The problem was that the sex had been good: they’d both learned things in the previous five years. No, the problem had been that, and the fact that beneath her new-found poise and confidence, Clara hadn’t changed that much. What she still really wanted was to be someone’s wife, look after them. No, the problem was the sex, and Clara wanting to be a wife, and Harry’s temporary and mistaken belief, amid the strain of being a newly appointed lecturer, that she could do with a wife.

No, the problem really was that Clara not only didn’t know much about history, she didn’t know much about historians. And it hadn’t occurred to Harry until long after they’d got together that she needed to explain about them.

***

Clara had expected that a history lecturer would earn enough money to allow her to give up her own job, and was disappointed to realise Harry’s prospects wouldn't allow that. And what with Clara being expected to do overtime and Harry’s evening seminars, they never seemed to have enough time together. Clara hadn’t realised that Harry’s teaching would leave her frazzled and distracted during term time. Clara dreamed of them moving, so Harry could take up a professorship somewhere nice: she mentioned Oxford and Durham and St Andrew’s, but was hostile when Harry applied for a post in Liverpool. Above all, Clara hadn’t realised that Harry being a historian involved her spending so much of her life thinking about history.

Clara was mildly interested in history, in a prettified queens and country houses way. Harry wasn’t interested at all in reinsurance, despite her attempts to convince herself otherwise. They didn’t have much in common apart from the sex, she realised when she thought about it logically. Even their patterns of alcohol consumption were different, dangerously different.

Harry had no natural taste for alcohol, but with her usual determination, she’d trained herself to like it, used it to boost her confidence, help her fit in at conferences and seminars, help her get laid. Clara drank as a routine, not heavily, but as an automatic lubricant for her social and work life. She invited her friends round for drinks parties, she had a bottle or two of nice wine at the weekend, because that was what you did. Harry drank to persuade herself she liked Clara’s friends and was interested in hearing about reinsurance office politics. And because she was editing a book on women in prison with authors who appeared incapable of realising that handing in a chapter 15,000 words long at the end of July was not the equivalent of handing in a chapter 8,000 words long the previous October. And because Clara didn't like hearing Harry talk about female prisoners, and made that clear, but did still like having sex with Harry, especially if they were both slightly relaxed with alcohol. Enough alcohol.

You couldn’t pinpoint when you became an alcoholic, though Harry of course, had subsequently tried. She’d realised she had a problem when her contact details got removed from the Old Bailey Proceedings online, after one too many over-intense discussions with a user. She couldn’t remember now if that had been the corporal punishment categorisation debate or something to do with version 4 of the database. Version 4 had definitely not helped her drinking.

Clara had realised about Harry’s drinking at least a year before Harry had, and promptly done all the wrong things, been alternatively too critical and too indulgent. Once Harry had finally admitted she had a drink problem, and read a few relevant books, she’d pointed out, as tactfully as she could, some of Clara’s mistakes. Because she was now an expert on how to stop drinking. Well, an expert in theory. Harry’s other problem had been assuming that knowing what she ought to do, and doing it had any necessary connection. That self-knowledge was enough, rather than self-knowledge combined with common sense, and help from people who were prepared to stand up to her. Clara’s big mistake had been not leaving Harry.

It was Phoebe Phillips who saved Harry, and ended their marriage. Harry researched her intensely for a year and a half, and stayed sober almost all the time. It helped that she spent so little time with Clara. Well, it helped the drinking. It was probably a really bad move in every other way to show that you were more interested in another woman than your own wife. Even if that other woman was a long dead prostitute. Perhaps particularly if the other woman was a long dead prostitute. Harry barely made it through writing up the book and she was surprised that Clara didn’t leave her then. Clara didn’t leave even when Harry explained she was moving on to write about a cross-dressing highwayman. Clara was doggedly, persistently, staying in the marriage, which was sucking them both down into despair and disaster. Harry wasn’t sure she could save herself, but she had to save Clara. So she left her. It was, she thought afterwards, the one sensible decision she'd ever made about Clara, so of course John disapproved.

***

I made Clara unhappy and I turned myself into an alcoholic, thought Harry, as she stared in the mirror in the BL toilets, and tried to find an expression that made her look more like a competent researcher, and less like a despairing teenager. And I'm still an alcoholic and now I'm making Molly unhappy instead. Not exactly progress, is it?

But no, she wasn't an alcoholic, she was a recovering alcoholic.  Which meant not drinking today, just like yesterday, and the day before, and last week, when she had Molly. She could get through this day too. But she might as well head home, because she could at least be miserable in more comfort if she was in her own flat.


	11. Saturday: John

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John's facing a different sort of battleground in Northumbria this weekend...

The question was, John thought, once he'd woken up from a refreshing sleep - because Grace Holmes might be a bigot, but she had a very comfortable guestroom - at what point did he phone Mycroft and telling him he was bailing out? Before or after breakfast? And why had Mycroft been such a grade A shit getting him into this mess, anyhow?

It was _odd_ about that, he finally realised. Because Mycroft might be a shit, but he was also a very clever man. He knew what his mother was like, and he wouldn't have brought John all the way up here for the hell of it. He'd practically told him what was going to happen, now he came to think about it clearly. Grace Holmes was prejudiced, but Mycroft thought John could win her over.

 _Why should I have to, rather than just walking away?_   Because he wanted to help Sherlock, and he knew how much Sherlock cared about his mother, for all their current estrangement. People could change, did change: _his_ mother had come to Harry and Clara's wedding. And more than that, he did not walk away from challenges. This might not have the same danger as the Pink Lady case, but it wasn't going to be easy either. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince an elderly homophobe to respect you. Well, a lot of other people had underestimated him in the past.

OK, that was the strategy, now for the tactics. And start from last night, because there'd also been something _odd_ about that. If Mrs Holmes really couldn't stand gays, surely she wouldn't have been willing to have him visit? And she'd seemed perfectly friendly at the start. Her comment about him being a poof hadn't been the start of an argument, or even the end of it, it had come completely out of the blue. So was it just social awkwardness, blurting out feelings she'd been trying to conceal? No, because she hadn't apologised. She'd sounded...she'd sounded almost triumphant, hadn't she? He knew that note in someone's voice, and he suddenly realised from where: Sherlock, when he was being deliberately offensive, outrageous. Mrs Holmes probably was prejudiced – a lot of people her age were – but she was also looking for trouble. So what he had to decide was how to respond to her provocation.

***

He went downstairs, following the alluring smell of bacon, and found his way to the kitchen. Mrs Holmes – Grace – was there, armed with a frying pan.

"I take it you're not a vegetarian," she said, as he came in, "or _dieting_."

"A full English breakfast would be lovely," he said, "Do you need me to do anything?"

"No thank you. Did you sleep well?"

This was surreal, he thought. So you're trying to pretend you didn't say what you said last night. Very weird. Very...Sherlock.

"Fine," he muttered, and waited for the next conversational bullet.

"I thought we should go up on the moors today," Grace said, as she put a plateful of fried breakfast in front of him. "Work off all this."

"Sounds lovely. I didn't get to see any of the countryside last night. What did you have in mind?"

"I was planning to take you up to Edlingham. There's a good walk up there, Caller Crag, Shiel Dykes and the Black Lough. It's ten miles or so, beautiful views."

She hadn't asked if he wanted a ten-mile hike across Northumbria, any more than she'd asked what he wanted for breakfast, John realised. It was all take it or leave it stuff, wasn't it? And then it dawned on him what this was, and he was hard put not to start giggling. Officer selection weekend. Was he presentable enough, tough enough, good enough for Sherlock? He'd had it from Mycroft in the warehouse last year, and now he was getting it from Grace Holmes. Well, he wasn't intimidated this time, either.

"The walk sounds lovely, but I'll need some decent footwear," he said calmly. "I didn't bring my army boots, and I could do with some decent walking boots anyhow. Is there somewhere in Alnwick I can buy some?"

"There's a clothing shop on Fenkle Street. Or I might be able to find a spare pair."

"Second-hand boots are never a good move. I've seen too many blisters and sprained ankles after training exercises not to take care of my feet."

"Did you train up here?" Grace asked, and there was a hint of warmth in her voice now.

"I was over at Otterburn before I got deployed. Eaten alive by the mosquitos. If it was summer, I'd want to buy insect repellent as well."

"We'll get you some boots this morning," Grace said, smiling. "Since we're taking the dogs, I'm afraid it'll have to be the Range Rover rather than the Lotus. Still, it's a nice drive into Alnwick."

***

He survived the drive, even if his heart rate was up a bit after the hairy moment at the first crossroads. So the next test was not wincing too much at the price of the boots. Extra shifts next month, he thought.

"Anything else I need?" he enquired. "Map, compass, emergency rations, whistle?"

"I'm not planning to abandon you in the middle of nowhere, if that's what's worrying you," Grace said, smiling in a slightly menacing way.

Another bloody Holmes mind-reader, of course, thought John.

"I thought today was the initiative test," he said, smiling blandly at her.

"And so far you're doing well," she said smiling back. Her eyes were a darker grey than Sherlock's, but there was the same concentration in them sometimes. "But what should we do next?"

 _Logistics exercise now, is it?_

"It's just after eleven," he said cautiously. "The walk will take us three hours or more, because  you...I don't want to rush and miss the scenery. So, you could show me around Alnwick briefly, and then we have an early lunch. Find a pub that won't object to Amber and Barney. Then we get on with the walk so we're off the moor before dark. Rough walking in poor light isn't my idea of fun."

"An excellent plan, Dr Watson," Grace said smiling. "Good to know you haven't forgotten all your army training."

***

John let Grace set the pace, literally, on the walk. This wasn't a fitness test, this was proving that he wasn't an ignorant townee and that she wasn't a little old lady. It wasn't hard to admire the dramatic scenery and the ever changing shades of grey in the sky. He found himself wondering how Sherlock would behave on a walk like this. He was normally uncomfortable in a place without a mobile phone signal, and yet he'd strode around Dartmoor that time with infinite confidence.

"Have you lived up here long?" he asked after a while, as they stopped for a snack. "You're not from Northumbria originally, are you?"

"No," she said, "but I came up here as a child and loved it. So when Matthew, my husband, died I abandoned London, never to return. There are several stones round here with prehistoric markings, if I can just find them."

When she did, they looked to John like almost random marks, just holes in the rock, but he was used by now to seeing things he couldn't understand the significance of.

"There have been people living up here for five thousand years or more," Grace said. "Puts being 72 into perspective."  

It's tough growing old on your own, thought John. He'd felt that way when he first got back to London. But expressing sympathy to Mrs Holmes was probably a rash move. He stood in silence instead.

"You can still feel the past round here," she said. "Whereas they've now concreted over most of southern England. You're a southerner, of course?"

"Yes, or maybe an eastener. I grew up in Bury St Edmunds."

"A Suffolk man. What did your parents do?"

Here it came, thought John, should have guessed we'd get the class issue. He was surprised Grace Holmes hadn't worked out his exact social background already, but perhaps she didn't quite have Sherlock's skill.

"My mother was a teacher. Science teacher. She's retired now."

"And your father?"

"He died in 2003. He'd been ill for a long time before that with multiple sclerosis. Couldn't work. It was very hard on Mum having to look after him." It was his test for her, in a way. Could he distract her by sympathy or would he have to tough it out with facts? He wasn't really surprised when she said:

"And before that?"

He smiled, because he wasn't embarrassed about this bit.

"He was a mechanic," he said. "One of his friends told me once he was the best tractor mechanic in Suffolk."

She was staring particularly hard at Barney now, and he could _hear_ her mind logging his reply, analysing it. And then she turned and looked at John and said:

"And you decided to be a doctor?"

"I decided I'd rather fix bodies than machines."

"A good tractor mechanic is hard to find," she said, dryly, and he knew that for some complex reason he had suddenly become acceptable.

"But then I suppose a good doctor is as well. Did you always intend to join the Forces?"

"Didn't occur to me till I was at medical school. I went along to the University of London Rifle Club, wanted to give it a go. Found I had a talent for it, made some good friends. One of them was talking about joining the army, got me interested."

Tom Wickham had not only introduced him to the idea of joining the army, but to poker and his sister Clara. He'd probably made the right choice of which of the three to stick to.

"An excellent move," she said. "The army needs good men, whatever their, erm, tastes. My grandfather and father both served in the Middlesex Regiment. Of course, that's been amalgamated several times: it's the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment now, I think."

Of course, he thought, there'd be a service connection somewhere in the family. Even if one that neither Mycroft nor Sherlock had followed.

"So how long were you in Afghanistan?" Grace asked, and he sighed inwardly and began to answer her questions about the war. Because he might be a poof, but he could at last prove to her that he was a brave poof. 


	12. Saturday: Sherlock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even Sherlock's finding this weekend a strain now...

All this talk about a 24/7 society was rubbish, thought Sherlock, swigging yet another cup of coffee. Oh, _he_ might be prepared to work through the night to solve Harry's little problem, but the letting agents he needed to contact next weren't going to be open for another two and a half hours. Didn't they realise that people might be interested in details of their tenants at 6.34 a.m.?

He couldn't do anything else on the case for the moment, not till Shinwell Johnson got back to him. And Shinwell didn't get up till 10 a.m. on weekdays, let alone after a typical Shinwell Friday night out. If criminals and ex-criminals could keep such odd hours, why didn't letting agents? Unhelpful of them. It meant he had too long to sit around thinking about things. Like how quiet 221B was without John.

It was far too early to phone John, and he probably still had his phone switched off anyhow. He should have said something to him, shouldn't he? Told him he knew he was going to Alnwick, and he would come with him. Except...except he couldn't bear to be there and see his mother push John around, and John just taking it, not fighting back.

And to have what they felt for one another cheapened, laughed at. His mother would doubtless regard their relationship as just one step up from a sordid bit of cottaging, two men who couldn't control their own warped desires. She couldn't understand what John meant to him. He'd found it hard to understand it himself, at first. It was odd that it had been Harry who'd worked it out, given how much of a disaster area her relationships were. But, of course, Harry was incredibly well-informed on the _theory_ of relationships...

***

 **April 2010**

He'd seen Harry a few times at the hospital in the aftermath of the swimming pool explosion, pale, sometimes sober, but more often halfway to being drunk. Drunk or sober she'd looked daggers at him, and he'd been surprised when he got a text from her. A very peculiar text:

 _Have you read Alan Bray's The Friend? HarWat_

 _Not my area. SH_

 _Come and discuss it tomorrow. My place before 10 a.m._

***

Harry only started drinking mid-morning, he suspected, so he turned up at Vauxhall at 7.30 am. He found her in her pyjamas, her breakfast abandoned because she'd remembered a reference she needed to check. He made himself coffee while she scribbled notes, because he didn't want her distracted when she eviscerated him verbally. At last she came and sat down at the kitchen table.

"Sorry about that," she said, "I...there was something about N-Newgate  I n-needed to check." She stared in slight surprise at the remains of her breakfast.

"It's fine, Harry," he said, smiling. He could tell she was psyching herself up to say something really outrageous, so he decided to short-circuit her. "Do you want me to tell you how you could kill me, because though I'm sure you've got inventive ideas, they're unlikely to be practical?"

"I don't want to kill you," Harry replied, looking up at him. "Well, n-not m-much. N-not anymore."

"You don't?" he said. "Even though...I, erm, blew up your brother?"

"I talked to John," she said, which sounded ominous. "He said you only blew up the explosives once he'd agreed. He agreed to being blown up, which m-m-made m-me want to kill him, which means I can hardly blame you for n-nearly killing him."

Now was not the time to point out the flaws in her logic, Sherlock thought.

"But what I n-need to kn-know is," said Harry doggedly, "is M-M-M...the bomber dead? Really, p-properly dead?"

"I'm sure that Moriarty is dead, yes." He wasn't lying in words, only in emphasis. _That Moriarty_ was dead. He needn't tell her the possibility of him being a front man, or of other members of the organization taking over from the boss. "Jim from IT is dead."

"You're absolutely, definitely sure?"

"DNA samples from the body at the pool match those found at Molly's flat."

"M-M-Molly? Oh, she's the woman who told the police about M-Jim."

"She's a pathologist at Barts. Jim became her boyfriend in order to spy on me."

"The p-poor woman.  Is it worse to find out that you're boyfriend's a m-mass m-murderer, or that he's a dead m-m-mass murderer?"

"Molly's tougher than she looks, thank goodness. She'll get over Moriarty."

"You're a heartless sod, aren't you, Sherlock?"

"You know me too well, Harry. If I've reassured you that John's safe, and you don't want to kill me, is there anything more we need to discuss? Surely you've got a day's heavy drinking to fit in?"

She went white at that, but she didn't bite back, just looked at him thoughtfully, as if he was a particularly obscure manuscript. What the hell was she up to?

"I n-needed to talk to you," she said abruptly, "because you're n-not entirely a heartless sod, are you? Have you read Bray's book?"

"I told you, not my area."

"But you looked it up, once I'd m-mentioned it?"

"Study of medieval and early modern passionate friendship between men. I'll take it that it's historically accurate, and I'm aware that the phenomenon is recorded in numerous other cultures."

"Still exists today," Harry said, glaring at him. "You and John. P-pair bonding, I think the psychologists call it. It's a recognised phenomenon."

"Harry, don't talk about science, you just show your ignorance."

"I'm n-not ignorant about John," Harry said. "He's been in love with you almost since he m-met you."

"What on earth makes you think that?" She didn't _sound_ drunk.

"His blog."

"That _thing_? John doesn't reveal much other than his inability to write an analytical account of a case."

"Sherlock," she said confidently, "Do you know what I do for a living?"

"Sit around and talk about sex and crime. Nice work if you can get it."

"Read what p-people have written. And work out the subtext, what they haven't written. It's n-not always easy if it's someone from 200 years ago, and you've n-never met them. This is John, who I've kn-known all my life. I've read what he's written since it was 'the cat sat on the m-mat'. I miss things in conversations,  sometimes, get distracted. But if John writes something and I can read it, re-read it, I've got him n-nailed. And the way he wrote about you, I kn-knew straight away how he felt."

"Yes, John is in love with me," he said. It probably wasn't worth trying to bluff Harry. "And so?"

"John told me what happened at the pool."

"He was concussed. His memory of that night is likely to be scrambled."

"I kn-know about evidence, Sherlock. I asked M-M-Mycroft, found out he had tapes. He confirmed what John said. John grabbed Jim, so that you had a chance to escape, but John would have died. Greater love hath n-no m-man than that he lay down his life for his friend."

"John loves me. We've established that."

"And you didn't run. Greater love hath no m-man than that he says: 'N-n-not without you'."

"My reflexes were poor," he replied smoothly.

"Is that your best excuse?"

"Greater stupidity hath no man. I nearly got us both killed."

"Surely to you love and stupidity are p-pretty much the same thing?" she said, and she smiled at him.

"The logic of that statement is entirely defective."

"Doesn't m-matter," she said. "The heart of it's right. You and John are friends in Bray's sense. Though if you're going to share a tomb, like some of his examples, I'd p-prefer it if it wasn't anytime soon."

"Thank you for today's historical analogy," he said, oddly disconcerted that Harry, of all people, had worked the thing out. "I don't think there's anything useful I can say about the matter, and there's definitely nothing useful you can say."

"OK," said Harry, determinedly. "We're not talking about love, so let's talk about sex."

"Harry, why on earth should I talk about sex with you? I mean, obviously, not sex with you, that's a horrifying thought, isn't it?"

"Yes." She grinned up at him. "We don't fancy each other at all, so we can keep this strictly impersonal."

"You are strange sometimes, Harry." She looked about twelve in her dark blue pyjamas. A twelve year old _boy_. Her face a washed-out version of John's strength, and those ridiculous glasses, you couldn't take her seriously. Till you heard her talk.

"I m-may be strange, but that's irrelevant. The important thing is that you realise Alan Bray's friendship m-model, p-p-pair bonding won't work nowadays. If John's in love with you, how does he get sex?"

"That's surely his business."

"One n-night stands, casual sex, n-not good for him. But how does he find someone to be with, maybe even m-marry, when he's in love with you?"

"Such friendships have existed for centuries, as you've pointed out."

"Not when your spouse, your p-partner is supposed to be your friend as well. When you're meant to love the p-person you keep on having sex with. P-people used to m-marry for dynastic reasons, didn't n-necessarily expect love m-matches, sharing the whole of their life. But I wouldn't get involved with someone in love with someone else. Don't kn-know many p-people who would."

"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "You've read too much and you don't understand about real life. John simply finds someone who wants sex with no strings attached."

"John gets attached to p-people. He's very loyal, even when p-people behave shittily."

"Then he learns the unimportance of sex, its irrelevance."

"He's not good at P-Platonic relationships. I don't cope well being celibate, nor does John."

"Your _urges_ have nothing to do with this."

"But what John wants is everything to do with this. He's in love with you, he'll end up wanting to sleep with you. P-probably already does. So can you p-please either m-make him stop loving you or sleep with him?"

"Are you drunk?" he asked, because it was something to say.

"As it happens, n-no, but that's not the p-point. The p-point is, am I logically incorrect? Is there a m-missing option?"

Saying you shouldn't poke your nose into other people's business would be hypocritical. Detectives and historians shared that, at least. Easiest to follow her own bluntness.

"I'm not interested in sex."

"Have you tried it?" she asked seriously. Trust Harry to ask something like that. But he recognised the need to have facts to analyse.

"Yes. With men and women. I did not enjoy it."

"M-maybe you weren't doing it right. Or your p-partners weren't."

"Your scientific knowledge is so lacking that you've probably never heard of the phenomenon of asexuality." He said it matter-of-factly; he didn't want her pity.

"Might explain why some m-monks found celibacy quite easy." Of course, Harry in full-blown intellectual mode didn't let sympathy get in the way of an argument. "But I also kn-know from p-personal experience," she went on, "that enjoyment depends heavily on the p-partner involved and techniques."

"Harry, you should stop right now, for everyone's sake."

Something in his tone must have registered, because she did fall silent, but she was still looking at him, with an expression that said: _OK, prove me wrong_. And...he wanted data, didn't he? He always wanted data.

"You told me once John was a very good kisser," he said at last.

"I didn't, did I? Was I drunk at the time?"

"Fairly out of it. Is that true and how do you know?"

"Janice Wilson in my class told m-me. She was 14 and John was 16. I suppose she m-may not have had m-much evidence to compare, but he's had 22 years of practice, so he's p-probably even better now."

"What else were you going to tell me?" Harry looked at him guiltily, but said nothing. Oh, God, he was being slow, wasn't he?

"John's had male lovers before?"

"He's been in love with at least one other m-man. And I expect it got physical. It does quite quickly with women he likes. So if you wanted...but I'm n-not saying you have to."

"I thought you were?"

"I m-m-made a mistake. I thought it would help and I got it wrong. I'm n-not good at helping John. I just m-make things worse when I do."

"Do you call what you do helping John? You know what you're doing to him?" It was unfair, under the circumstances, but something might get through. "The divorce, your drinking upsets him." He remembered something else: "And you stole Clara from him in the first place, didn't you?"

"N-no. It wasn't like that."

"What was it like, then?"

"I'm n-not telling you."

"Why not?"

"Because it doesn't m-matter n-now. I got it wrong and I p-paid for it, and Clara and John as well. But it's in the p-past, it's all over n-now. And I am n-n-not talking about it, so p-please don't ask."

Four plausible explanations for her behaviour then, a couple of other less likely possibilities, but he couldn't get any further now. He'd work it out eventually, once he got more data.

"I'm sorry," Harry said into the silence.

"For what?"

"Even when I'm sober I say the wrong things. Forget what I said."

"I already have. You wanted to check that Moriarty was dead, because you're worried about your brother. The rest is history. Do you understand?"

She nodded, and he swept out of the room. But he wasn't entirely sure, for once, who had won that encounter. 

  



	13. Sunday: Molly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Molly may be trying to move on, but it's hard to forget about Harry

In theory, Sunday was Molly and Harry's day off. In practice, given Harry's inability to switch off from thinking about history, and how often Molly ended up being on call on Sundays, it didn't always work like that. But right now Molly would have been prepared to have several people die hideous and unexplained deaths if it would give her an excuse to go into work. No, that was a horrible thing to think. But she couldn't just sit around feeling sorry for herself, she should do something constructive. Clear out the spare room, as she'd been meaning to do for ages. Then she'd have space to put the new bookcases up.

Did she still need the new bookcases? They were supposed to be for Harry's books, after all. So that Harry could move out of her dodgy flat in Vauxhall and in with her now. She wasn't going to wait for months till she could prod Harry into going house-hunting with her. Harry might not care where she lived as long as she had her laptop and her books, but it really wasn't nice where she was. The tenants above had made Harry's ceiling collapse, and Molly was sure there was at least one drug-dealer in the block of flats. Besides, they really ought to be properly living together, settling down.

Well, it wasn't going to happen, but she would tidy up the spare room anyhow. In fact, the whole house, because it was a mess. Mostly Harry's fault, of course, she tried not to be untidy but her good intentions never lasted long. None of her good intentions, it turned out. Why hadn't Molly realised it couldn't last, that Harry was a lost cause? She supposed because it had seemed last autumn that Harry really had changed.

 **Molly and Harry (2010-?)**

Harry had crashed back into her life a couple of months after the birthday party. Sober. Almost literally crashed into Molly's life, because who but Harry would think a mortuary was a good place to visit for someone with haemophobia? And Molly had known at once. Known what she wasn't supposed to think, but was true. That Harry has sobered up for her sake, and that she could help keep Harry sober.

She hadn't really understood what being with Harry would be like. Not till their first sort of date, when Harry had taken her along to a book launch. The launch of Harry's own book, with her alternating between embarrassed celebrity and enthusiastic discussions of prostitutes and murder. Every now and then Harry had glanced at Molly in a way that make Molly's stomach knot. Or glanced at the bottles of mediocre wine in a way that made Molly's stomach knot in an entirely different way. But Harry hadn't drunk anything, and the party was nearly over, and maybe they could go and have a nice meal somewhere. And then someone from OUP – the one who had made the rather boring speech – came over and announced:

"So have you decided, Dr Watson, where you'd like to go for supper?"

Harry gave him a bemused look.

"You were told in our letter," the boring man went on, "that we'd take you out for a meal afterwards. Though I hope we made clear that we had certain budgetary constraints."

Harry turned to Molly with a guilty air, and Molly was just about to make brave sounding noises about needing to have an early night, when Harry suddenly smiled, and announced.

"I'd forgotten about the m-meal, and I'm afraid I can't come.  I'm a recovering alcoholic and I'm having terrible cravings at the moment. So it really would be better if I went home right n-now, before I do something stupid. And supper with a p-publisher definitely counts as stupid."

The OUP man was looking at Harry with the alarm of someone who saw a publishing disaster looming, so Molly thought she'd better intervene.

"I'm a doctor," she said, sure she wasn't sounding convincing. "Harry's doctor, actually. She'll be fine if I take her home, she's doing really well. She just mustn't over-excite herself."

Harry had managed not to giggle as they left, which had surprised Molly. In fact, Harry had been absolutely silent till they'd got safely out of Senate House. And then she'd jumped up on the first step outside Birkbeck, announced, "You're so m-marvellous", and leant down and started kissing Molly.

"Harry," Molly said rather breathlessly a few minutes later, when Harry finally let her go. "People will notice." Harry still had the shining look in her eyes of an alcoholic who'd just found a bottle of vodka, and any practical plans for the rest of the evening were clearly going to be down to Molly.

"OK," she said, "You've eaten but I haven't, so I'd like to get something quickly before I take you home..."

There was silence from Harry, which wasn't like her when she wasn't kissing someone. Molly suddenly had an alarming thought.

"You have eaten something this evening, Harry, haven't you?"

"I had some crisps at the start of the p-party," Harry said at last.

"But if you forgot you were being taken out to supper?"

"In between forgetting to tell you and John, and forgetting m-myself, I did actually remember, so I didn't bother eating earlier," Harry said, rather despairingly.

Molly wanted to pick Harry up, and wrap her up warmly, and make sure she was never hungry again. Somehow that translated into putting her arms round her to give her a comforting hug, and that translated into one of Harry's soft small hands burrowing its way inside Molly's coat. Almost immediately, Harry had a button undone at the back of Molly's dress, and her fingers were running up and down the hollow of Molly's spine in a very disturbing way. Dr Harriet Watson, Molly abruptly realised, probably knew how to take off any woman's garment of the last 300 years.

"You really should have something to eat," she said, trying to sound firm.

"I'm not _hungry_ ," Harry replied, sounding about ten.

"We could go for a nice meal out," Molly said. "And then perhaps later on..." She must be sensible, she was always sensible.

"Would you p-prefer that?" Harry asked, starting to disentangle her hand from Molly's dress. She managed to fondle the nape of Molly's neck with her other hand as she did so. For a woman so clumsy in most ways, Harry always seemed to know what to do with those skilled, gentle fingers. And Molly should not be so vividly reminded of the feel of them on her, in her. Harry was shoving her hands into her trouser pockets now, trying to look insouciant and failing miserably. Molly made an abrupt decision.

"How far is it to your flat?" she asked.

"Forty m-minutes or so, I'm down near Vauxhall, so I n-normally get the tube from Euston."

"We could have a snack on the way."

"That sounds wonderful. M-my flat's a bit small, but it's really cosy."

***

They sat on the Tube giggling and working their way through smoothies and cereal bars, because Molly was sure Harry needed all the vitamins and complex carbohydrates she could get. Though Molly's giggles died in her throat when she saw Harry's block of flats.

"It's better inside the flat," said Harry, as they went in, "except it is rather m-messy. I wasn't sure, I mean I hadn't thought you'd want to come, I...the bedroom's n-not too bad."

"The bedroom?" Molly asked automatically.

"If, if you don't want to, that's fine," Harry said nervously. "I didn't m-m-mean, well, yes, obviously I did m-mean, but n-not if you'd rather do something else. You're my guest." Molly could almost feel Harry try and force herself back into being Dr Harriet Watson, respectable academic. "I could m-m-make you some coffee, if you'd like."

Molly didn't like to think of the state of Harry's kitchen, judging by the cluttered chaos of the living room. Besides, that wasn't why she'd come here, was it? She'd spent too much of her life sitting around awkwardly, because she hadn't been prepared to admit what she wanted, even to herself.

"I'd rather come to bed with you than have coffee," she said.

"That's good because I'm m-much better at sex than coffee," Harry replied.  "I'm sorry, I probably ought n-not to say that, only it's true, and you are so gorgeous, M-M-M-Sue, and...the bedroom is this way and I'll shut up n-now."

***

The alarm on Molly's watch was ringing, and she couldn't find it to switch it off, and where was the bedside table, and...oh, she wasn't in her own flat, was she? She was in Harry's bed, in her briefs and some awful old T-shirt that she suspected was one of John Watson's castoffs. And she had really not been sensible last night, had she?

Last night had been...wonderful. Harry had made love with the simple enthusiasm of someone who'd worked out about sex from first principles and couldn't wait to share her knowledge. That was Harry all over, wasn't it? She clearly lived her life on those waves of enthusiasm, whether it was for cross-dressing highwaymen or Molly Hooper. Or alcohol, a small nagging voice said in her head, and she felt her doubts flood back. Did she really want to share her life with an absent-minded ex-alcoholic lesbian? Wasn't she going too fast, falling too hard? Maybe she should tell Harry to back off, that she needed time to think things through...

Where was Harry anyhow? They'd fallen asleep wrapped round one another, but Harry must have slid out at some point. Was _she_ having second thoughts? What might she be doing? She'd obviously been finding it hard to stay sober last night. Oh God, maybe she'd fallen off the wagon again.

She stumbled into the bathroom, washed her face. Tried to get the Molly she saw in the mirror looking more poised, not a hapless romantic heroine. And then she walked into the kitchen to find Harry was standing by the cooker stirring something. Her T-shirt and cargo pants would have had Connie Prince turning over in her grave, but she looked so happy, like a kitten that had just worked out how to chase its tail.

"I hope you like p-porridge," she said. "I'm n-not a very good cook, but I do m-make good porridge. I got it explained to me by the world p-porridge making champion. It's all about stirring p-properly and the right kind of oats. You know they used to live on this in the Highlands: they'd make a big batch and then stick it in a p-porridge drawer, and take squares of it to eat cold later. Only I'm n-not going to m-make you eat it like that, and if you want you can have m-maple syrup with it, even if that's only authentic if you're Canadian-Scots."

"You've been very busy," said Molly.

"I always wake up early, do m-my best work then, so there's space to eat on the living room table now. If you'd like a shower, this'll be ready in about ten m-minutes."

***

Molly had occasionally had a man cook her a decent breakfast after she'd spent the night with him. She'd never been offered porridge and maple syrup, and a surprisingly interesting discussion on the history of the sugar trade, which ended up with her trying to remember what she knew about forensic dentistry deductions from tooth decay. It was bewildering sometimes, being with Harry, but you couldn't say it was dull.

Then she looked at her watch and groaned. She was barely going to make it to Barts' in time.

"I'm sorry, Harry, I have to go."

"That's fine. Are you free sometime this week?"

"I'm...I'm not sure. I...if you phone me later, I'll know what things are going to be like at work." Molly scribbled down her number.  "I, I would like to go out with you again, it's just..." She couldn't think how to end that sentence.

"I p-promise next time it won't be a book launch," Harry said. "I don't blame you if you n-never want to see a historian again. But I was so grateful that you were there last night, because I was very, very close to starting drinking again."

"I guessed."

"They warned me that I m-might relapse when I was hungry, angry, lonely or tired," said Harry doggedly. "They should have had an extra warning about n-needing to avoid book launches."

"Will you be OK today?" Molly asked.

"It's a good day," Harry said smiling. "I don't n-need to drink on the good days." And then she went on hurriedly. "But you should p-probably go right n-now, because otherwise there are all sorts of things we'll end up doing that you m-might regret later." She gave Molly one quick maple-syrupy kiss, and let her out of the flat.

*** 

Molly hadn't been that surprised when she got a phone call from Harry mid-morning. She had been surprised when Harry had announced: "Would you like to go the theatre tonight? I'm at the half-price ticket booth and they've got _Les M-Miserables_ , or _M-M_ -the Abba one."

"I've seen both," said Molly. "Which would you prefer?"

"If we go to _Les M-Miz_ I'll complain about the historical inaccuracies and you won't like that. But I've heard that _M-Mamma Mia_ has some very interesting insights into how women bond-"

"It's got really good songs, as well," said Molly. "I think you'll like it."

"Right, I'll get the tickets now. The show's at 8.30, so if I m-meet you at 8.15 at the Prince of Wales theatre, is that OK?"

"I'll meet you there at 7 pm," said Molly firmly. "Or as soon after it as you can manage. We need to eat something before the show."

"You're absolutely right, M-Molly. I'll see you at seven. Bye."

You couldn't resist Harry, Molly thought, as she put her phone away. Well, she could, but it didn't seem worth it. Whatever else happened, things were never going to be boring again.

***

Halfway through Sunday morning, and Molly had the house mostly tidy. Just her bedroom left to sort out. She could go out this afternoon, she told herself, as she changed the sheets.  Go over to Dulwich perhaps, to the Gallery. Or maybe into central London and buy some new books, since she was going to have extra shelf space. Go along to Foyles; she could sit in the café there, maybe get talking to someone. Some women did that: a chance to meet a nice man, a nice woman. But she didn't want anyone else: she just wanted Harry, as long as she was sober. Harry had spoiled her for unsuitable men _and_ unsuitable women.

It was incredible how much stuff had accumulated in her bedroom, She lay on the floor and started to pull out the things that had somehow got under the bed. Socks, a pair of slippers, several ballpoint pens. And then she fished out the last item – an issue of the _English Historical Review_ – and found herself bursting into tears.   
  



	14. Sunday: Harry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry's part mistakes are still, as ever, haunting her.

The only thing Harry had to do that weekend was write a book review. Or rather rewrite it, because there were certain things she couldn't say. _Professor Davis' book is marked by a careless attitude to evidence of which he should be ashamed._ Which was accurate, but harsh. But then the truth was often harsh. Dr Harriet Watson could write prize-winning scholarly articles, but not lead a good life. _Dr Watson's behaviour is marked by a careless attitude to others of which she should be ashamed_.

She never meant to hurt people, but she still did – making stupid decisions, not concentrating on what she was doing. All this mess would have been avoided, after all, if she'd only stayed away from Clara when they'd first met...

***

 **1997**

Harry hadn't expected to enjoy meeting Clara Wickham. It hadn't just been John's usual adoring descriptions of her - though John was always convinced the women he fell for were perfect till shortly before the messy break-ups. It was also that it was Clara's brother Tom who'd got John wanting to join the army, which was _terrifying_.

Still, she was going to be nice to her for John's sake. If he was serious enough about Clara to get engaged, and bring her to Suffolk for a weekend with his family, Harry had to try and get on with her. And Clara was better than she had expected. Posh, and sweetly shy, and tall - probably taller than John, if she wasn't carefully in flat heels. A big gorgeous girl, all glossy brown hair and inviting curves.

An invitation she wasn't going to accept, of course. Harry saw the danger signals in John's eyes as she arrived, the look that said: _One false move from you, Harry, and I'll remove your internal organs without anaesthetic_. So though she'd almost automatically smiled a cheeky grin at Clara, she'd kept her distance after that, said almost nothing during tea, and sat around harmlessly reading Henry Fielding afterwards.

It was only that evening that she realised that her mother, with guests in the house, had reverted to pretending that they were all respectable, at least by some bizarre standard of 1950s respectability. John and Clara were not sharing a bedroom. She and Clara were:  'girls together', as her mother had put it.

"What's going on?" Harry muttered to John, as they did the washing up.

"You know what she's like. But I thought it would be OK once we were engaged," he said.

"Do you want m-me to say something?"

"Leave it. I don't want you and Mum having a row while Clara's here."

"After they've gone to bed, we can sort things out," she told him.

"Thanks." Whatever their differences, they were a team when it came to dealing with their mother.

***

Harry got herself safely upstairs at an early hour, curled up with her book on the camp bed installed in her room. She heard her father shuffling upstairs – he was having a relapse with the MS, which was depressing -  and then half an hour later Clara came into the bedroom. That probably meant that her mother was ensuring that everyone was sleeping where they should be.

"Hi," Harry said to Clara, who was looking vaguely worried. "Don't worry, we'll work things out when it's gone quiet."

Clara's look of worry intensified. Possibly, Harry decided, she needed to be slightly more explicit.

"M-Mum doesn't want you and John sharing a room, but if you sneak out of here and spend the n-night with him, I won't tell. Just wait till it's all quiet or there m-might be a row."

"John says you're a lesbian," Clara said abruptly, sitting down on the bed.

 _Thank you, John._ But he'd probably decided that Clara needed to understand the peculiar dynamics of the Watson household. She wondered if she should explain to Clara that John's girlfriends were off limits. But she really, really, didn't want to have to discuss John's previous girlfriends, so instead she just smiled at her and said:

"Yes, I am a lesbian, but I'm harmless. M-mostly harmless. If you want m-me to leave the room when you're getting undressed, I can do that."

"It's OK," said Clara. "I was at a girl's school. A boarding school."

All Harry knew about boarding schools came from Enid Blyton and she didn't remember any lesbians in them. But never mind, at least she wasn't worrying Clara.

"When did you know you were a lesbian?" Clara asked.

Harry was used to strange questions about her sexuality by now, and her teaching instinct kicked in.

"Only really when I was 18. I came out just after I went to university."

"A friend of mine, her name's Jill, told me she was a lesbian when she was 13, but she's just got married and she's got a baby on the way."

"P-people change," said Harry, "It's not as simple as just being gay or straight forever and ever. And you don't really know what you want at 13. I was still secretly hoping I could be Zorro."

"I wanted to be a ballerina, said Clara, "but I was too tall already. You'd be just the right size."

"Yes, but I'm hopelessly clumsy. And I wouldn't enjoy p-pretending to be a swan."

"Has John always wanted to be a doctor?"

"He thought he might be an engineer, at first. But always something p-practical," Harry said. "Dad was a m-mechanic before he got ill, so John used to help him with that."

"My brother Tom wants to be in the Royal Engineers when he joins up. Mummy would prefer him in a cavalry regiment, like Uncle George, but John's explained to me about how important the engineers are in the army. And the RAMC, of course. Do you know they're going to have their centenary next year?"

A hundred years of watching men kill each other and trying to patch them up, thought Harry despairingly.

"John's still thinking of going into the army, is he?" she asked.

"Yes. He'll make a wonderful officer. I can't wait to see him in uniform."

She's such a kid, thought Harry, even though she's my age. She hoped John knew what he was doing. Talking of which, the coast was probably clear by now.

"If you want to m-make a dash for it," she said, "John's n-next door on the left."

Clara smiled her lovely smile and went out.

***

Clara sneaked back into Harry's room early on Saturday morning, looking rather weary, and Harry wondered if this was what boarding school was like, only with a different sort of midnight feast. She supposed she and Clara were chums, after that. Certainly, several times that day she caught Clara looking at her, a warm smile on her generous mouth, as if they shared a secret now. She was really sweet, wasn't she, Harry thought, glad that John's taste in women had finally improved.

Well, mostly glad. She had to admit, as they were sitting in their bedroom that night, waiting for the lights on the landing to go out, she felt rather envious of him, as well as annoyed that her mother was still being so ridiculous. It was obviously winding up Clara as well, who was nervously swinging her feet, as she sat on her bed, a frown creasing the smooth creamy skin of her forehead. And then Clara looked across at her and said abruptly:

"Harry, how do you know if you're a lesbian? Because I think I might be one."

***

Forty minutes later, Harry was still rather desperately listening to Clara's account of her unfortunate love life. It had been one of Clara's previous boyfriends, of course, who had suggested Clara was a lesbian, just before dumping her. In fact there had been a whole string of horrendous-sounding boyfriends before John, so many that Harry wondered if it'd be rude to ask if she could take notes to keep them clear.  And it was all somehow tied up with Clara's relationship with her sister, who was shorter and slimmer than Clara and sounded like a complete bitch. Still, having a horrible time with horrible men and not getting on with your family didn't make you a lesbian, it just made you normal. She needed to know if there was anything more specific.

"So are there women you're attracted to?" she asked, during a break in Clara's outpourings. "Or feel p-particularly close to?"

"I really liked Jill," Clara said, "the friend of mine who got married. And there was a girl at work. I've never even talked to her, but she's so gorgeous and I wondered what it would be like to kiss her. Or...or what she'd look like without her top on."

"Or what m-might happen if you accidentally got trapped alone with her in a broken-down lift for hours?" asked Harry. She always reckoned that was the office fantasy of every non-claustrophobic lesbian. Clara nodded, a faint blush colouring her cheeks.

"And there have been other girls I've...thought about. So am I a lesbian?"

"I don't kn-know," said Harry. "You n-need to work that out for yourself. But you also n-need to talk to John, if you're having doubts about your sexuality, n-not sure what you want."

"But I know what I want!" Clara burst out. She was getting near the crying stage now, Harry could tell, this whole tidal wave of long-concealed feelings coming out.

"What do you want?" Harry said. She was probably getting Counselling for the Complete Amateur hopelessly wrong; better to start from that.

"I want," said Clara, "to be married, to be someone's wife. Because I'm not good at doing things myself, but I am good at looking after people, and helping them and making them happy. And I love John and I want to make him happy, and I don't _want_ to be a lesbian, because then I couldn't wear nice dresses."

It was the most coherent statement that Clara had made, and Harry decided that trying to explain the principles of feminism was not going to help.

"Well, if you really want to m-marry John that's great," she said, "but you still have to talk to him about all this. He'll understand. There are some p-people who are bisexual, which means that they're attracted to both sexes, enjoy sex with either m-men or women."

"How can I be bisexual then?" Clara demanded. "I don't like having sex with _anyone_!" And then she did start crying.

***

It was at that point that a sensible woman would have gone and fetched John and told him to sort his fiancée out. Or failing that, left the house and walked back to Oxford. Harry, of course, had stupidly, stupidly tried to help Clara. She'd known what it was like to be uncomfortable and ignorant about her body. Not to be able to ask for what you would like. From the incoherent euphemisms coming from Clara, Harry thought that was probably the problem. She hoped it was, because that was at least potentially soluble.

"I can't tell John I don't like it when we do...that!" Clara wailed.

"He's p-practically a doctor, he won't be embarrassed. He's very kind, gentle. If you just tell him what you like-"

"I don't _know_ what I like. I don't know about sex. Only those silly science textbooks at schools."

"There are other books," said Harry. "M-more helpful ones, that explain properly about women's bodies."

"You can't learn about this from books."

"It's harder, but you can," Harry said. "I, it didn't come n-naturally to me, at first. I'm n-not good with my body, but I read stuff and I tried things out. And it does feel so good once you find out what you like."

"You enjoy sex? You're not just saying that because you're supposed to?"

"No. I know how to m-make it good."

"Then show me, please, Harry. Show me what it's like to have good sex."

***  

 _Feminist ethics elementary examination_

 _You are a lesbian and your brother's fiancée asks you to instruct her in sexual techniques. Do you:_

 _a) Fetch her fiancé immediately._

 _b) Provide her with a reading list._

 _c) Suggest she sees a reputable sex therapist._

 _d) Offer her a hand-mirror, some lube and a few helpful suggestions._

 _e) Decide to sleep with her, in order to encourage her to enjoy sex with her fiancé._

 _Answer: f) Don’t get yourself into this situation. And remember that you should be sorting out your own mess of a life, not other people's._

***

Harry could never clearly remember what had happened next. Or at least, she could remember what she'd done but not why; she'd told herself so many versions over the succeeding fourteen years. The hopeful ones, in which she'd done what she did out of pure charity, the urge to help Clara, even perhaps John. And the depressing ones, in which something deep inside her hadn't been able to resist the temptation not just of Clara's body, but of competing with John. She'd been trying to keep up with her big brother all her life, after all. But however much she'd analysed the events, she still didn't have a good reason for why Harry Watson, would-be sex therapist, had somehow concluded that it would be a sensible move for them to end up naked in the same bed with the lights out.

***

She couldn't remember if she'd somehow deluded herself that it was all just harmless experimentation, demonstrating the erotic power of touch. What was still vivid in her mind was realising that the only lesson Clara was probably learning was that gay sex was almost as horrible as straight sex. After a bit of gentle hugging, she'd started teasing Clara's nipples and not got much of a reaction, but that didn't worry her. Not all women found that a turn on. But as Harry gradually worked her clever fingers and lips round Clara's big, beautiful body, she still felt no positive response. From Clara at any rate; her own body was already starting to hum with possibilities. But if she ended up putting Clara off sex even more, it would be truly disastrous.

"You're so beautiful, I could touch you, hold you forever, all of you," she told Clara, nuzzling her neck with kisses. "But what would you like m-me to do?"

"I...it's fine, what you're doing."

"Would you be m-more comfortable on your side or on your back?"

There was a long silence from Clara and then she whispered: "Back" in a tone that suggested she'd been asked to choose between being hanged or shot.

"That's good," said Harry, her fingertips stroking Clara's thigh. "M-maybe if you let your legs relax, spread apart a bit m-more..." She could _feel_ the tension in Clara's body, the wrong sort of tension, almost imagine the miserable voice in Clara's head calling herself a failure.

She had a sudden memory of herself in the school gym trying to climb a rope ladder and the PE teacher telling her to put her leg on the next rung, and push. And even though everyone else had managed it, Harry's leg wouldn't do what she told it to do, and the sheer awfulness of being trapped in her inadequate, hopeless body was paralysing, her muscles locking even tighter as she'd hung there helplessly...

Alcohol stopped Harry worrying about her body, relaxed her enough that it didn't seem to matter if it didn't work quite properly. Maybe she should have had a glass or two before gym classes. Maybe it would help Clara now...No, she couldn't get Clara drunk or even tipsy, that wouldn't be right. Somehow, somehow, she had to get Clara away from her own misery, into a different Clara, someone whose body could respond, if her mind would only let it. What was that old line about the most important sex organ being between the ears?

"Who do you fantasize about?" she asked into the darkness, and then realised that was the wrong question. "Who's the m-most romantic man you can think of?" Better to stick to heterosexuality, she decided.

"You know who I really like?" Clara said, and suddenly there was a touch of pleasure in her voice. "We read _Wuthering Heights_ at school, and then I saw the films, both the films, and-"

Oh God, thought Harry, please tell me not _him_.

"Heathcliff's just so wonderful," sighed Clara.

 _You've misread the book_ , Harry wanted to yell. Heathcliff is a vicious sod, even if he does look like Laurence Olivier, which he doesn't. But right now wasn't the time to give a critique of men who were mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Now was the time for Harry Watson, a five-foot nothing blonde dyke with a stammer, to pretend to be Heathcliff.

***

It had been years since Harry had read the book, but maybe that didn't matter. This wasn't Emily Brontë's Cathy and Heathcliff, after all, it was Clara Wickham's.

"What do you find so romantic about Cathy and Heathcliff?" she asked.

"They love each other so much, even though they're married to other people. And the bit where Cathy says "I am Heathcliff", and then she dies, and he weeps on her tomb, and you know how he'll love her forever. And I cried when I read that, that they wouldn't be together, like they were meant to be."

"Would you like someone like Heathcliff to love you, to m-make love to you?" said Harry. "Tall and dark and he loves you so much that n-nothing can separate you?"

"Yes," breathed Clara, and a small part of Harry thought: _poor John, why does no-one think short blonds are romantic_. Never mind that now, she decided, and said: "Let's p-p-pretend, Clara, that you're Cathy. Outside this window, it's the m-m-moors, it's wild out there. Can you hear the wind howling, wuthering? It's cold, and it's bleak, there are lost souls out there. But in here the fire's warm, and you're in your bed, and Linton is far away, and you kn-know who's here? Heathcliff."

"Heathcliff's here beside you, he can't keep away, even though you can't be his, your love is doomed. But what p-people don't understand, n-not even Nelly, is that you belong together, you are one, he cannot live without you, _you_ are his life. You are m-made for one another: when he's happy, you're happy, and when he's m-miserable it's your own heart being cut out. Your souls are the same and your bodies belong together. Because buried deep inside you there's a spark, and Heathcliff will turn it into a flame."

Harry reached out and put her hands on Clara's shoulders, and then tightened her grip.

"You want Heathcliff's strong hands on you," she said, "You want him to fill you completely, every p-particle of your body, because you are his already, Clara, Cathy, you always have been, you always will be." She didn't know about Clara, but this torrent of words was making her lose herself. Into someone who took what they wanted, regardless of the consequences.

"Do you want m-me, Cathy?" Harry growled. "Tell me that you do. Linton m-means n-nothing to you, Cathy, but you and I belong together."

"I want you, Heathcliff," Clara whispered.

"Then p-put your hand here on my breast." Harry felt Clara's warm fingers on her own flat chest and hoped Clara's imagination was very powerful. "And kiss me. Show m-me how you feel."

Even she was running out of words now, but it didn't seem to matter, because Clara's body was moving against hers, her arms going round Harry, stroking her cropped hair as Heathcliff relentlessly forced his mouth against hers. Clara's breath was coming faster, and Harry's hand slipped cautiously down past the  soft curve of Clara's hip, began to slide into the crease of her groin. Her fingers brushed across Clara's curls, warm and slightly damp to her sensitive touch. She wanted this, didn't she? They both did. Harry took a deep breath.

"We belong together," she said confidently. "We are one, n-nothing else m-matters, just us two. You're so warm and I'm cold, Cathy, I'd lost my way, but I've come home now. Let me in n-now, into you, you belong to m-me, you _are_ me." Her fingers curved down to brush again Clara's labia.

"I am you," Clara said shakily. "I belong to you, all I want is you..." And then she gave a gasp and added, "Oh God, do that again, just there, please, H-Harry."

***

What we learn from this, Dr Harriet Watson told an imaginary class, as she sat alone in her flat, is that sex is strange and mysterious because people are strange and mysterious. There is no obvious explanation for why a previously sexually unresponsive woman gets turned on by sub-Mills and Boon dialogue and is subsequently able to achieve orgasm, but it happened. A historical event, you might almost say, at least in Clara's personal history.

 _But what do we conclude about the other participant in that scene, class? Harry Watson, who persuaded herself that the end justified the means, that this whole scenario could somehow have a happy ending?_

 _Oh her_ , the imaginary students chorused back in union, _she's just an idiot._


	15. Sunday: John

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John is finally getting to grips with the Holmeses

Sunday breakfast at Threeways Farm was poached eggs on toast. Possibly other breakfasts were available, but John decided not to ask. He was fairly certain he was in credit at the moment, but Grace's goodwill was still a slightly uncertain commodity.

"Matins is at eleven, and I'm reading the lesson, so I need to go," Grace announced mid-morning. "But I take it you're not a churchgoer?"

"It says C of E on my dogtags, but not really, no," John said. "Remembrance Sunday and Christmas usually. And there was a very beautiful Advent service at St Bartholomew's that Mycroft took me to." It had seemed strange to him, at first, that Mycroft was a regular church-goer, but he now found it oddly easy to believe in the existence of Mycroft's God, omniscient and omnipotent, and willing to reward those of his followers who adhered to his rather inscrutable will.

"Well, it probably wouldn't be a good idea you coming with me, anyhow," Grace said firmly.

"Why's that?" She wanted him to react to her provocation, he knew that by now. Just like Sherlock did sometimes. "Because I'm living in sin with Sherlock?"

"Because the curate is preaching today, and you really would believe in eternity after hearing him," she said. "So I suggest you stay here and examine your conscience on your own."

"It's clear," he said, smiling, "well, mostly clear. Sherlock told me the advantage of being an Anglican is that they consider the Ten Commandments to be an exam paper: no more than seven out of ten to be attempted." He'd gone too far, he suddenly realised; there was a glitter in her eyes that suggested she was torn between amusement and indignation. He was going to get it in the neck for that one, wasn't he?

"So why did you seduce my son?" she enquired haughtily, which from Grace was actually quite restrained.

"I didn't."

"I hardly think it could have been Sherlock's idea. He's never been interested in that sort of thing. Or with girls, either. You must have done _something_."

"He started kissing me out of the blue one day," he replied cautiously. "He said it was an experiment. And, and things just went on from there."

"You have had a remarkable effect on Sherlock," Grace said. "Some of it, at least, quite positive."

"Thank you," he said. "You did say the service was at eleven, didn't you? It is, um, nearly quarter to now, you might want to make a move."

"I got a postcard from an aunt of mine when I passed my driving test in 1959," she replied. "It simply said '2 Kings chapter 9, verse 20'. I'll come back here after the service and then we'll go and have lunch at the Red Dragon." She swept out of the room, and John fished his phone out of his pocket and looked up her Bible reference online. _The driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously_. He found himself grinning: she was an appalling woman in some ways, but it was never dull around her. Rather like being with Sherlock, in fact.

Should he have said that about it being Sherlock who'd made a move on him? Even though Grace was Sherlock's mother, he'd almost been tempted to tell her more, see if she could explain what had happened. Because it still didn't make sense to him: it was somehow so Holmeslike the way it had come out of the blue.

***

He'd been in love with Sherlock for ages, of course, but even the night at the pool hadn't changed things. He'd known for sure then what he felt, and Sherlock had known, and he'd known Sherlock knew, but...it hadn't made any difference. Sherlock wasn't interested in a relationship, John had always accepted that.

What had changed, when he'd finally come out of hospital after the explosion, and Sherlock was back from Alnwick, had been Sherlock looking at John. He'd done a lot of that for a while, as if John was a problem to solve, a weird new problem. Which was odd, because surely Sherlock had had his number right from the start. But he hadn't thought anything of it, that day in early May when he'd been cleaning his pistol at the kitchen table and he'd realised that Sherlock was standing by the sink, watching him intently again.

No, what he'd thought, he remembered now, was that Sherlock was thinking about the Sig. Sherlock hadn't attempted to get his hands on it after the events at the pool, but there were still times when Sherlock looked at John's gun the way Harry could look at a bottle, as if it was taking every ounce of his control not to grab it, whatever the consequences. And then Sherlock had come towards the kitchen table and demanded: "Stand up."

John had done so, almost without thinking, and Sherlock was suddenly close to him, far too close, and bending down, and his lips were fastening onto John's in the kind of determined kiss that you used to see in black and white movies. And the tiny part of John's brain that wasn't preoccupied with exploring the pressure of warm, full lips against his, and the feel of Sherlock's arm, which had mysteriously wrapped itself around John's back, was thinking: _When this ends, I'll find my own gun pointing at me, and he'll call me a sucker_.

But when Sherlock did suddenly release him – John hadn't been planning to go anywhere – Sherlock was the one who looked baffled, standing there in front of John and breathing too heavily, as if he'd just chased a taxi across London. John waited, but Sherlock didn't say anything. Down to him to sort things out as usual, John concluded.

"Why did you do that?" he asked, a little shakily. It seemed a safer question than: _Would you like a fuck right now?_

"Harry said you were a good kisser. I wanted to check."

"Harry said that? How drunk was she at the time?"

"That's irrelevant, surely, given that she was right. At least, I've not much experience, but that seemed...seemed pleasant."

John was just about to offer Sherlock another go if he needed to check that, when an alarming thought struck him.

"So what else has Harry told you? Not about-" He broke off abruptly: it made no sense to help Sherlock deduce things.

"I hardly think it requires outside help after _that_ to realise you're sexually attracted to men," said Sherlock, with a touch of his normal arrogance, "or to me, at any rate."

 _Not Harry betraying me this time_ , thought John, _my own body_. God, this was not going to end well, was it?

"So, erm, now you know, is the experiment, or whatever it is, over?" he asked. Whatever was going on, he didn't dare make assumptions, not with Sherlock involved.

"Not...necessarily," Sherlock said abruptly. The last time John had heard him so worried was when he'd just ripped a bomb-jacket off John. "I, I, do you remember the night at the pool?"

"Of course," he said, and waited. But Sherlock didn't seem to know what to say, he was just standing there, fiddling with his cuffs. He'd been fairly incoherent that night as well, hadn't he?

"It was pretty...intense, wasn't it?" John said, and realised that incoherence was obviously contagious.

"I realised then that we were friends," said Sherlock. "Friends in every...friends."

"Yeah. We're definitely friends, true friends."

"But it's not enough for you, is it?" Sherlock suddenly burst out. "It took me a long time to realise, to observe that. You want friendship, but you'd like more, wouldn't you? Something more, more physical?"

He couldn't lie, but his tongue didn't seem to be working properly, so he just nodded in reply.

"It's not right for me to ignore that," Sherlock went on doggedly, his hands reaching out to take John's shoulders. He wanted to say yes, accept whatever was on offer, hold onto Sherlock and never let him go again, but he had to be sure Sherlock meant it.

"It's OK," he forced out. "I know, it's all just transport for you. You don't have to-"

"I want to, I want to _try_ ," Sherlock's voice was slower now and his face had the intent look of someone seeing things that no-one else had spotted. "I've had...I've been with...I've _slept with_ people before and it didn't work, I didn't like it, but maybe...I trust you." His hands gripped tightly, almost bruisingly, onto John.

"I'll do my best," said John. "I think maybe we can make it work." He took a breath, willing himself into the calm, careful state of someone about to carry out surgery.  "Do you want to come to my bedroom? We could lie down, maybe just start with a cuddle. But don't do anything you don't want to."

Sherlock gave a tentative smile and headed upstairs.

***

What did you do when your dream came true, John thought, to stop it becoming a nightmare? He'd taken it as slowly as he could, despite the distracting throb of his own erection. Slowly, slowly removing  Sherlock's shirt, slowly, slowly touching him: lips, skinny arms, slender waist. Nothing too intimate yet. Sherlock was so beautiful, the muscles in his torso flexing beneath the pale, smooth planes of his skin. It was easy for a while just to enjoy the surface of him, the surprisingly warm touch of flesh beneath his fingertips. But beneath that, he started to realise, there was a wary tension in Sherlock. No, it was more than that: John sensed a bone-deep resistance, even though Sherlock said he wanted this.

"You're used to ignoring your body's signals, aren’t you?" he said abruptly, "Blocking out that you want to eat, to sleep. Maybe it's the same with sex. You don't want to be aroused, because it means losing control."

"Amateur psychology?" Sherlock sneered, propping himself up on one lean arm, so he could look down at John. "Do you always bring that to the bedroom?"

There was always a point, with Sherlock, when you had to prove you weren't going to take things lying down.

"Perhaps," John said firmly, "you need to think a bit less. Concentrate on feeling, not analysis." That was a pointless thing to say, though, wasn't it? You couldn't stop Sherlock observing, as well as seeing. Somehow he had to harness that. Then an idea struck him.

"You always reckon your hands are very sensitive, don't you?" he said.

"I can read a crime scene through my fingertips alone," said Sherlock.

"OK then," John said, grinning at him. "Think of it as a game. We both strip off, you feel me, feel yourself, compare our bodies. Work out where I like to be touched and where you do."

"Interesting," said Sherlock, and John could sense him relaxing at the thought that this wasn't any kind of trial of his own powers, or at least not one he might fail. He had a sudden suspicion that he wasn't going to last long, not the way that Sherlock was scanning him as he undressed, cataloguing possible attack points.

He was right. Sherlock had obviously decided that the important thing was to focus on John's body, and he showed a remarkable ability to work out rapidly just where he could get results with his long fingers, get John gasping, half in agony, half in pleasure. Perhaps fortunately, Sherlock hadn't yet worked out how to prolong the agony, and John, enthralled by the promise of Sherlock's own naked body – all sleek, smooth angles, apart from the generous curve of his arse – came rather more quickly than he intended.

"Right," John said, grinning dopily and trying to get his breath back. "I think we've established most of my erogenous zones. What about yours?"

"I...no," said Sherlock.

"Alright," he replied, his grin fading, but trying hard not to sound disappointed. Sherlock was like no-one else, of course, sex with him wouldn't be normal. "I'll just go and clean myself up, and then, whatever you'd rather do, we can do."

"I didn't mean it like that," said Sherlock. "It's just it won't work. Like I said, I've tried sex, with partners, self-stimulation. It was just...just meaningless sensation."

"Did you find it meaningless just now?" said John, and abruptly realised that was a question to which he really didn't want an answer. But Sherlock was frowning, slightly confused.

"No," he said, eventually. "It should have been, but it wasn't. I am...interested in you and your reactions."

"So are you interested in seeing what I might do to your body?" said John. "Because Harry's right about me being a good kisser, but that's not the only thing I can do with my mouth. There are some things you can't really do on your own, unless you're a contortionist."

"You mean fellatio," Sherlock said, as if retreating into technical terms somehow made it easier to cope with the prospect.

"Yes," said John. "Oral sex. Which doesn't just mean talking about it." There was a tiny flicker in Sherlock's eyes and John's mouth opened, and he said stupidly, "Yes, you can talk about it. But only afterwards." Because he'd suddenly remembered that Sherlock made sense of the world via words, addressed to John, or to the skull, or just floating round in his brain. Would he really give up not just the chance of a new experience, but the opportunity to lecture John about it subsequently?

"Are you up for this?" he added, smiling up at Sherlock. "You can say whatever you like afterwards, but are you willing to try?"

"Yes," said Sherlock, and there was an edge in his voice now. "Time for your demonstration, I think, Dr Watson."

***

John still wasn't sure that this was going to work: if Sherlock had somehow screwed up his own mind enough that his body wouldn't respond favourably to a blow-job. Till the moment that the tip of John's tongue gave a teasing lick to Sherlock's foreskin, bringing a tiny gasp in reply. John took it slowly, still, and it was only when Sherlock's body started to rock rhythmically up into his touch that John finally swallowed him, relaxing his breathing as Sherlock thrust enthusiastically up. _Got you interested now, haven't I_ , he thought, as his hands started to stroke Sherlock's shaft. Sherlock's teeth were gritted tight, seemingly unwilling to let a single unconsidered syllable through, but a few minutes more and his body was spasming into orgasm, just as if Sherlock was more than an disembodied brain.

John rolled off him, and waited as Sherlock lay silently on the bed. There was a not-quite-focused look on Sherlock's flushed face, as if his mind had temporarily got offline. That was surely more encouraging than him being eager to announce how comprehensively John had fucked up the situation. Even so, some clue as to what was going on in the man's head would be useful.

"Did you enjoy that?" John asked into the silence, and then winced at his own banality. But Sherlock didn't retort with some cutting comment on John's intellect. Instead he said, in a puzzled tone:

"It was...better than I expected."

"I was hoping for amazing, but that's a start," said John. "It's easier if you're not trying to fight against feeling anything."

"But why should it be you doing it that makes a difference?" Sherlock demanded, sitting up and staring at John. "When what we're talking about is fundamentally reactions to particular physical stimuli, such as mouth and tongue contact to the genitals? I don't think your technique was substantially different to any I have previously encountered."

"That isn't the point," John replied. "I kissed a girl once, when she wasn't expecting it, and she stuck her hand down my jeans and tried to get me off. I tried it with another one and she nearly knocked my block off. Same action, different effects, depending on mental states." He paused. "So what are you thinking?" It probably wasn't the right question, but he wasn't sure what was.

"That I find it hard to respond appropriately," Sherlock said, "but maybe with practice, I..." and then he stopped, and drew a breath and almost gabbled, as if he was scared he would lose his nerve, "It was all right and I want to do it again, and I'm glad, glad you enjoyed it and you did, didn't you?"

"Yes," said John, and his arms went out to hold Sherlock, "It was wonderful, you were wonderful. We'll work things out about the sex; there are other things we can try that you might like more."

"There are websites," Sherlock said abruptly, "or books."

"Oh God, yes there are," said John. "I don't know. Maybe a book would help you. It never did much for me, except be the most embarrassing Christmas present ever."

"What happened?"

"Harry happened, of course. She gave me the _Joy of Sex_ one Christmas when I was nineteen or twenty, and just broken up with my girlfriend. She didn't warn me, so I opened it in front of my parents. I came close to discovering if you could die from blushing."

Sherlock was shaking with laughter, which John thought was a good sign.

"I'm sure she meant well," he said at last.

"Oh, yes. She always does, she's quite...sweet that way. But there is still no more terrifying sound than Harry saying "I was just trying to help". Broken toys, a dead hamster, a worrying number of destroyed jumpers. She just spreads chaos wherever she goes." It had been almost funny, once. It wasn't now.

"Sometimes she gets things right," Sherlock said.

"Less and less. She's...she's just spiralling down and I don't see a way out for her."

"Nor do I, at the moment," said Sherlock. "But just occasionally Harry can surprise even me."

***

The memory of that day was making John's body ache for Sherlock's touch right now. He pulled out his phone, so he could at least send him a text. Maybe even a obscene one. But no, he couldn't, he decided. If he started texting Sherlock, he'd demand to know how John was getting on with his mother, and... it wasn't just that he couldn't possibly put this weekend into 160 characters. It was the ridiculous, but inescapable feeling that if he texted anything positive he'd somehow jinx himself, bring down disaster. After all, he still had – he looked at his watch – five and a half hours before catching his train. Grace Holmes could have all kinds of further tricks up her sleeve yet.

***

"I've got a special treat for this afternoon," Grace Holmes announced as they sat in the pub eating their lunch. There was an oddly familiar smile that made John realise that something else bizarre was coming up. Unarmed combat, a dip in the North Sea, abseiling down castle walls...

"Alnwick Garden," she announced.

Trial by boredom, thought John. "I'm afraid I don't know much about plants," he replied, "but I'm happy to be shown around."

"There's one bit I think you might enjoy," said Grace. "It's not normally open to the public this time of year, but the Duchess of Northumberland is a friend of mine, so we've got a special tour. It's Sherlock's favourite as well." John looked quizzically at her.

"They have to have a special license from the Home Office for some of the plants, and keep it locked up," Grace went on cheerfully. "The Poison Garden."

***

It was quarter past four by the time they'd finished with the Poison Garden, because both Grace and the gardener showing them round were very well informed about botany, and John had a few good anecdotes about murder to contribute. Then Grace had decided he needed a pie to take home with him, in case the train had no catering, and promptly got talking to someone in the baker's. Soon, she was busily sorting out their emotional problems, like a ruthless cross between Miss Marple and Jeremy Kyle. By now it was ten to five, and John was starting to get twitchy. Still, his luggage was in the Lotus, and it was only ten minutes to Alnmouth station. Besides, East Coast trains were probably still winding up the rubber band on their train.

It would have been OK, if they hadn't got stuck behind a tractor at a crucial stretch. Even then, he might have made it, if East Coast hadn't just this once decided that 17.05 meant 17.05 and not quarter past or so. John watched the train pull away as he was getting out of the car, and hurriedly went to check the time of the next service. He dreaded the thought of Grace deciding to try and catch the train up at the next station.

"The next one's 18.56," he announced to Grace on his return. "Gets back to London about midnight, they've got engineering works."

"Is Mycroft paying for your travel?" she enquired.

"He bought the tickets, yes. His money, not the taxpayer's." He'd long since given up being embarrassed about subsidies from the Holmes family; they enjoyed extravagant gestures.

"In that case stay the night, and he can pay for your tickets for Monday," she announced. "Serve him right for not arranging for you to stay till then, anyhow. It's hardly worth coming all this way to go back mid-Sunday."

"I, um..., "John said hesitantly. He wasn't working on Monday, but even so...

"Or do you really prefer the dubious delights of the last train to London?" Grace asked, in a tone that suggested he was either going to be mugged or end up engaged in lewd acts if he took the 18.56.

"If you're happy to have me for an extra night, that'd be great," he said politely, and then realised that he meant it.

***

As Grace drove almost sedately back, he suddenly wondered if she'd meant him to miss the train. She was a Holmes, after all. And then, as they got back to the house, she said casually, too casually: "You seemed to know a lot about poisons. And narcotics as well."

They'd had cannabis, opium poppies and coca plants in the garden.

"I've picked things up over the years," John replied cautiously. "You see things in the army. As a GP as well."

"You know Sherlock had a cocaine habit when he was younger?" Grace said, giving him an assessing stare.

"I'd guessed," he replied. "He's never said anything to me, but other people have mentioned things."

"I've gathered quite a lot, both from Sherlock and Mycroft, over the years," she said, and for the first time there was uncertainty in her voice.

"Things that it might be useful for you to know, given that you and Sherlock are obviously very close. That you...care for him."

A gentleman at this point would have said something about not breaking confidences or gossiping. Maybe John had just spent too long round the incurably nosy pair of Harry and Sherlock.

"If there's anything you think you'd like to discuss, I'd be happy to help," he said, smiling encouragingly at her. "As confidential medical background, you understand."


	16. Sunday: Sherlock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Someone_ has to keep an eye on Harry while John's off enjoying himself in Northumbria. And Fate seems to have decided it's Sherlock's turn.

Sherlock had never seen the point of Sundays. He knew the theory, of course: a chance for people with humdrum work to escape it briefly, to _enjoy_ themselves. But it was frankly irrelevant to the rhythms of his own life, the highs and lows of cases and stagnation.

But John liked Sundays, and there was something oddly satisfying about Sundays with John, even when there wasn't a case on. Not just the lingering in bed, but the restfulness of it, because for all his craving for thrills, John was also good at taking things easy, unwinding not just himself but Sherlock. A lazy Sunday afternoon with John was just what he fancied right now.

Right now, unfortunately, John was in Alnwick, probably being humiliated by his bloody mother, and he still hadn't got Harry's case sorted out. He knew the answer but he couldn't prove it. Six million people in London, sixty million in the UK, but it shouldn't be taking so long to find the one man he wanted. And there was a countdown on this case as well, even if not a fixed number of hours. If Harry was left for too long in this depressed state, she would do something stupid; he recognised self-destructive urges when he saw them. He should go over to Vauxhall at some point, even if he didn't have a complete solution for her yet.

***

Sherlock knew he was right when he turned up at Harry's flat that evening. It wasn't just that the circles under her eyes were twice as dark as they'd been on Friday. Her flat was at once too tidy and not tidy enough. She'd started sorting things out and then given up in despair, rather than being distracted by work as normal. He sneaked a look in the kitchen, and saw nothing but a couple of mugs waiting to be washed up.

"When did you last eat?" he demanded.

"I had some breakfast. I bet that's m-more than you did."

"I'm not the one who does stupid things when I'm hungry."

"Is John going to be p-pleased when he gets home and finds you haven't eaten today?"

"All right," he said. "Order a takeaway, we'll both eat something and then we talk."

***

It was only once they'd both worked their way through a pizza that Sherlock announced: "If you thought about it, Harry, actually used your mind for once, you'd realise that you can't be responsible for the whisky in your flat."

"I couldn't remember. I don't kn-know what I did."

"I said your mind, not your emotions. How would you have obtained those bottles?"

"How?" She gave him a baffled stare across the kitchen table.

"Mechanisms. You may go round in a state of stupor, the rest of the world doesn't. It was Ardbeg whisky, thirty pounds plus a bottle. No purchases of that size on your credit card, no large cash withdrawals. How else could you have got it?"

"Gift? P-prize? Stolen it?"

"Who do you know who gives gifts or prizes like that?"

"I could be a thief," she said, as if this was still an abstract argument.

"Harry Watson, you might just be morally capable of shoplifting. You're certainly aren't practically capable of it."

"I could have p-purchased the whisky one bottle at a time."

"You may want to be guilty, but you're not. Could even you forget six separate purchases of alcohol?"

"But if it wasn't m-me, who was it? Not M-M-Molly."

"No, Molly's just as unlikely as you. So my next step was some archaeology."

She was focusing on the problem now, which was always a good sign with Harry.

"Digging down in m-my flat?"

"Stratigraphy. The whisky was at the back of that cupboard. If you looked in there, you'd have noticed it, if you were sober. In fact, your alcohol detection capabilities were probably even better when you were still drinking. So when did you last look in that cupboard?"

There was a bemused silence.

"I forgot, Harry, you can barely remember what day it is. The only other thing in the cupboard was old photo albums. Who, if anyone, would be sentimental enough to want to see them? Do you get them out in order to embarrass John?"

"N-no," said Harry, and suddenly smiled. "And yes, I have got embarrassing photos of John and I'm n-not showing you them."

"I feel sure that Molly would want to see how cute you were as a child. A sweet little blonde princess, no doubt."

"Did you have long ringlets as a child, Sherlock? Little Lord Fauntleroy clone, were you?"

"There is a picture of me as a page boy aged five, in velvet trousers. I'll show you that in exchange for one of John as a teenager."

"N-not even for that. I haven't shown M-Molly any photos."

"So the cupboard hasn't been opened since you got together with her, presuming you haven't shown them to anyone else. Which takes us back to last summer. Anyone been alone in this flat since then?"

"Alone?"

"I assume that even you would notice if someone brought six bottles of whisky into your flat while you were here. At least if you were sober."

"No, n-no one. Well, the builders have been in."

"You know, Harry, you had a brain once. Try and recover its use."

"Builders wouldn't bring two hundred pounds worth of whisky into m-my flat. The landlord has a key, but again, why would he do that? And n-no one else has access."

"Someone else did have access for several days, if not weeks. Do you remember your ceiling falling in, due to the riotous behaviour of the bunch of criminal lunatics above you? Who therefore had access to your flat via the hole in their floor."

"They didn't steal anything."

"Did you have anything in the flat worth stealing, other than your laptop, which you brought with you to 221B?"

"Some of my books are valuable."

"They wouldn't think of those. Besides, they weren't interested in stealing anything more. They were interested in hiding the stuff they'd already stolen before the landlord came round to investigate their antics. Stash the bottles in your flat, in a cupboard that was obviously little used, and they had a decent chance of retrieving them later. If they'd come round to apologise a few days later, distracted you with some cheap booze, they could probably have removed half your flat and you wouldn't have noticed."

"So what went wrong?"

"I'm not sure. That's why it's taken me so long. I still haven't tracked down the thief. I suspect it was a man called Pat Wormald, but I haven't yet found him or his associates. But there's circumstantial evidence, as well, enough to clear you. The plaster dust didn't help, unfortunately, but the fingerprints on the bottles are very interesting."

"M-mine would be all over them. I thought they m-might not be real, so I p-picked them up to check."

"You thought you might be hallucinating whisky bottles while sober? You have a strange imagination. Your fingerprints and Molly's are indeed on the bottles. No-one else's are. Which proves what?" He paused, just in case Harry was with it enough to appreciate his logic, but she just gazed at him in confusion.

"I suppose you're probably incapable of the simplest feats of deduction in your current state. Who gives you, or sells you, a whisky bottle and doesn't leave their fingerprints behind?"

Harry frowned in thought. "A vending m-machine?"

He grinned at her. "You have a certain idiotic genius sometimes, Harry. The bottles must have been wiped before you and Molly handled them. Therefore their previous owner shouldn't have had them."

"So it really happened the way you said?" Harry asked.

"Almost certainly."

She beamed up at him. "You're sodding brilliant, aren't you? I m-mean I kn-knew you were, but I didn't really understand it before."

"That was simple," he said, smiling back.

"N-no, you're just brilliant. Thank you. Can you explain it all to M-M-M-Molly, please? Then it'll all be OK again, won't it?"

"You don't hold it against her that she didn't trust you?"

"No," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "I'm n-not trustworthy. I'm trying to change that, but it's hard. M-maybe even harder than the n-not drinking. I've let a lot of people down over the years."

She had the same lethal honesty as John. No wonder they were both hopeless at lying to others; they couldn't even lie to themselves. Hard for them, but it was sometimes quite good to be on the receiving end of that truthfulness. Sometimes.

"What are you thinking about?" Harry asked suddenly. "If m-my inferior m-mind can cope with hearing it?"

"You and John."

"You should be thinking about _you_ and John. He's back tonight, isn't he? Have you heard from him?"

"I haven't checked my phone recently." He tried to sound offhand.

"You're n-not worried, are you?"

"Of course not."

"Yes, you are!" Her grin had turned sympathetic now. "You're terrified. I don't kn-know why, but you are. Sherlock, this is John. The Taliban couldn't finish him off, are you saying your m-mother can?"

"Knowing two Holmeses is bad enough," he replied uncomfortably. "Three might tip the balance. It's one thing to put up with someone you...care for. It's another to get landed with their awful relatives."

He realised the implications too late, and waited for her to yell at him, but instead she started giggling. Which set him off, of course.

"Look at your damn m-messages," Harry finally managed to get out. "Or if you can't face it, let m-me look at them, and I'll tell you."

Sherlock pulled out the silver phone from his pocket, and saw Harry's eyes widen in recognition.

"Oh, that isn't, is it?" she said. "My phone?"

"It's not yours anymore."

"Well, it's certainly n-not yours, unless John's giving you second-hand p-presents n-now."

"I'm borrowing it!" he protested. "He's got somebody's phone with him."

"So let me look," said Harry, stretching out a small hand.

"Piss off, Harry Watson, stop being a nosy historian. Just because it's a text doesn't mean you get to read it."

"Then tell me. P-please. He's my brother. What does he say?"

" _All OK, but missed my train, staying at Threeways Farm till Monday morning. Mycroft's going to have to shell out for peak train tickets. Love, John._ My God, I don't know how, but he's tamed my mother."

"That's m-my brother," Harry announced. "He can do anything."

"Shall I tell John you said that?" he asked, sardonically.

"N-no. John'd be embarrassed, and feel he has to call m-me an idiot. But I'm not always, am I, Sherlock? Just n-now and then I get things right."

"Yes," he said smiling. "Law of averages, I suppose." He felt suddenly deboned, adrenaline seeping away with his relief.

"Are you OK?" Harry said, looking at him anxiously. "Do you n-need a drink? Because I definitely do." She stopped, shaking her head. "I didn't m-mean-"

"Yes, you did. Oh sod it, Harry, you can't weaken now. I'll sort things out for you with Molly tomorrow."

"Why not n-n-now?"

"Because we need to talk to her in person, but it'd be past eleven by the time we could get over to Colliers Wood, and Molly would almost certainly be in bed. And I am not entering her bedroom, under any circumstances. We will talk to Molly tomorrow morning."

"It's too late, Sherlock," Harry suddenly wailed, "Tomorrow or tonight, it's too late. I can't do it! N-not sober."

"Why not?" His voice was harsh.

"Because it hurts so m-much, and right n-now I could go and get a bottle, and then it would stop hurting. I wouldn't be scared if I had a drink."

Oh God, he'd got it wrong, hadn't he? Harry's despair had been a paralytic; she didn't have the energy to seek out alcohol. But hope renewed her energy and her anxiety. If he left her now, she'd either go out and get drunk or she'd be bouncing off the walls of the flat with nerves. Either way she'd be in no fit state to cope with Molly in the morning.

"Do you have any sleeping pills?" he asked. She shook her head. Probably not surprising no-one would give her any. But he couldn't just leave her like this, not when John was stuck in Northumbria coping with _his_ relatives.

"Come back to 221B for the night," he said. "I've got pills and I'll be around if the insomnia's really bad."

"But you've got alcohol there."

"I'll lock it away. Or stick you down in 221C again, like when you were detoxing. But I'm not having you wreck your life this weekend, Harry, you can do it some other time. Go and pack your bags, you've got ten minutes. Or you could just use John's stuff, as usual."

She was ready in twelve minutes, argument free, which wasn't too bad. She sat quietly in the taxi, staring out of the window in a daze. Exhaustion and stress getting to her, obviously, but she'd probably be functional tomorrow if she got some rest. Which gave him an idea. He banged on the glass partition of the cab, and told the driver to stop.

"Why are we getting out at Victoria Station?" asked Harry.

"Because you're walking the rest of the way. Why bother with sleeping pills, when half an hour's walk will knock you out as effectively, and you'll be less dopey in the morning."

"Alright," said Harry. "But remember my legs are shorter than yours."

She was soon complaining about route marches, and it took them nearly three quarters of an hour, but they got back to 221B safely. He half-dragged up her the flights of stairs, and deposited her in John's bed, and she simply curled up and collapsed, almost too tired to drag her glasses off first. He removed some parts of a dissected fax machine, pulled a duvet over her, and then switched off the lights and left. If Harry wasn't talking, that was sign enough that she was almost asleep.

There wasn't much alcohol in the flat, but he stuck all that he could find in the fridge, because nothing short of imminent starvation would get Harry opening that, not after the pickled rat incident. He'd probably have to clear up some of the experiments as well, she was terribly squeamish. A nuisance, but someone had to care for Harry, and temporarily, it was down to him. She was John's sister, after all. And given he'd helped her dry out, it would be a shame to waste that effort.

***

 **August 2010**

He'd not just been surprised, but slightly impressed by Harry on the morning after Molly's birthday party, when Molly had turned up with the nervous glow of someone who'd just had her life turned upside down by a small, scholarly tornado. Once Molly had left, John had started berating a particularly washed-out looking Harry, who could probably have passed for a cleaned-up Dickensian orphan. Till she opened her mouth and announced that she was planning to give up drinking, and could John please help, rather than just nag her.

Her timing was lousy, as usual. John had had two hours sleep that might and had shot Sebastian Moran dead, though it was almost certainly the former rather than the latter that was making him so ratty. Once it became clear that Harry wanted to detox immediately, it was Sherlock who was together enough to suggest she move into 221C.

"We can't get her into a clinic at this kind of notice, and it gave her more chance of success than if she goes to stay with Clara," he pointed out.

"She can stay here," John said, with the persistence of a man too tired to realise how idiotic he was being.

"No!" he yelled, almost simultaneously with Harry, and then added, "I have experiments to do."

"Yes, we kn-know about your bloody experiments," said Harry. "Bloody, as in blood, as in I don't want to see them." She looked in a fractionally worse state than John, but love and a hangover were doing nothing to dampen her natural stroppiness. "I don't want to spend several weeks in the Hammer House of Horrors, thank you."

"221C is damp and gloomy," John said.

"If it's got wifi and a desk, I'll be fine," Harry replied. "Oh, and I suppose a bed, as well."

"You're not going to be in a fit state to work," John said. "This isn't going to be easy, you know. You need to think about what you're doing, not just rush into it."

"I'll lose my n-nerve if I don't rush," said Harry. "P-please can you help, both of you. I've got to do this."

"Why now?" said John. "Why, after all this time?"

"I'll explain later," Sherlock said. "For now, John, concentrate your few non-dormant neurons on working out what supplies we'll need."

***

Harry's drying out hadn't been as physically horrendous as Sherlock had been expecting, but the mental effects were disturbing. Harry screaming at John till Sherlock wanted to hit her. Harry crying, begging John for a drink, then begging John to let her die. And John yelling back at Harry, harsher with her than Sherlock had heard him with anyone, even murderers. It was unbearable.

On the fifth day he'd gone down to 221C to find Harry alternatively trying to slap John and knee him in the groin, and John grey from the effort of restraining her safely.

"Get out of here, John," he demanded, "I'll deal with Harry."

John had the sense to go without arguing, and fortunately he'd got upstairs before Harry made a rush for Sherlock. Because possibly John might have objected to Sherlock tripping up his sister and then twisting her arm behind her back, while sitting on her legs.

"OK, Harry," he said calmly to the tiny fury wheezing beneath him, "You haven't a hope against me, and I'm not a gentleman, like your brother. I will hit a woman and extremely hard, if necessary. So can you just stick to verbal attacks or you will end up feeling even worse than you do currently. Do we have a bargain?"

For a moment he worried he had done some serious damage – she was too damn breakable, without any of John's physical toughness – and then he heard her whisper: "Understood." He got off her, and helped her up into an armchair. So what did he do, now he had temporary custody of this deranged, alcoholic midget?

"Why did you attack John?" he asked at last. Start with basic data collection.

"He called m-me an idiot," Harry replied, looking up at him glassily.

"Why?"

"Because I am."

"Why specifically?"

"I wanted a drink and he wouldn't let m-me have one. Even though if I had a drink I would be n-nicer to him. I'm definitely n-n-nicer when I'm not entirely sober."

"No, you're not," he said firmly. "You're bizarre, loquacious and mostly harmless whether you're drunk or sober."

She looked at him with sudden focus. "John's got you reading Douglas Adams?"

 _Mostly harmless_. He grinned at her guessing correctly about his reading habits, and then it occurred to him.

"You know what's wrong with you, Harry? You've not just sworn off alcohol, but thinking. Your mind needs to start working, than your body might shut up."

"I can't think straight."

"No, John hasn't tried to make you think straight. You need to talk, Harry, but about something interesting, not your pathetic, sentimental feelings. What's the square root of minus one?"

"I'm not a fucking m-mathematician."

"No, but you're not a pure ignoramus. What was the most important discovery of the eighteenth century? The condensing steam engine or oxygen?"

"That five-year-olds could do a day's work in a factory and n-not die. That people can survive on a diet of bread and jam. That you can get very rich if you decide to treat p-people like disposable p-parts of a m-machine. The working classes, children-"

"You missed out women and slaves."

"Exploiting them wasn't an eighteenth century discovery. More like eighteenth century BC." There was an edge to Harry's voice now, but it was the right sort of edge, Sherlock decided. The sound of her voice and brain getting back into gear. John always reckoned she could argue till she was blue in the face; time to see if she could talk till she forgot she wanted to drink.

John reappeared three hours later and promptly retreated in the face of an animated discussion of how easily you could strangle a man with his own bootlaces. By the time he returned in the evening, insisting they both needed to eat something, Sherlock had told Harry about twenty-three of his cases and she'd only guessed seven right. Though, on the other hand, he was now better informed on early modern forms of contraception and why Tony Blair deserved life imprisonment.

***

"You actually enjoyed that didn't you?" John said, as they were going to bed that night. "Spending hours arguing with Harry."

"I was trying to help, before you snapped and throttled her."

"You liked it. You like her. Which is...fine, but strange."

"She's isn't boring, you must give her that. Or at least when her mind's working and she forgets about the transport."

"Going to recruit _her_ as an assistant?" The hint of jealousy in John's voice was mitigated by the fact that he was unbuttoning Sherlock's shirt rather than his own.

"Of course not. She's extraordinarily unobservant, since her mind's so focused on the eighteenth century. And she could probably fall off a rooftop even while sober. Is her complete lack of co-ordination down to the drinking?"

"She's always been clumsy, nose in a book, oblivious to everything else, even as a kid," John said. "Drove Mum wild. I suppose it's not surprising she's ended up as she has. Well, not the lesbian and alcoholic bit, maybe."

"When did she come out?" Sherlock asked. You were supposed to show an interest in your partner's family, weren't you? It was politeness, not simply gathering useful data.

"When she was eighteen, and just gone up to Oxford. She'd had a pretty sheltered life as a teenager, especially with Dad being ill, but she made up for it after that. Spent years falling messily in and out of love. And then she got together with Clara again, and I thought there was going to be a happy ending. Goodness knows what kind of awful woman she'll end up with now."

Lack of observational skills clearly ran in the family, thought Sherlock. Though probably better not to explain to John about Harry and Molly till he had more information on that situation.

"Anyhow," John added, "could we please not talk about Harry? Or anything, really. It's just, well, it's been a hell of a few days."

"As long as I have something to do with my mouth," Sherlock said, smiling. "And of course, there are reasons why I prefer you to your sister. Do you need some help removing your briefs? They look rather snug fitting currently."

***

Sherlock was in the living room that night, researching flavours of Monster Munch, when he heard the footsteps coming upstairs. 3.56 am. He listened as they retreated again. Harry had insomnia, did she? Distressed enough to come upstairs to find John, still rational enough to realise belatedly it'd be antisocial to wake him. Probably worth going down to forestall any further problems: a sleep-deprived John and an alcohol-deprived Harry were clearly a toxic combination.

Harry was curled up in a chair when he went down to 221C, looking like a sickly ten-year old. Exhausted, miserable, and obviously been crying. But probably not suicidal, so that was OK.

"I didn't m-mean to disturb you," she said. Her voice had a croakiness that suggested earlier screaming. He hoped she hadn't worried Mrs Hudson.

"What would get you to sleep, Harry? For the sake of other people's sanity, if not your own."

"Hemlock."

"Sleep you wake up from. It's presumably too much to hope for that your system responds to something as normal as hot milk?"

Harry shook her head. She was practically asleep already, she just needed something to push her over the edge, he thought. The right edge.

"How much exercise have you had today?" he demanded. "Other than screaming?"

"You keep m-me chained up in this dungeon, don't you?" she protested half-heartedly.

"Tomorrow, we'll buy a lead, and John can take you for walkies. Tonight, there are fifteen steps up from here to the ground floor, and another seventeen up to 221B. Making, as even an arts graduate ought to be able to work out, thirty-two in total. Go up and down there five times, but hold onto the handrail, because John will kill me if you fall and break something."

Harry got up and went out without a word, which just proved how far gone she was: Harry Watson, stair-climbing zombie. He stopped her when she came stumbling down the second time. Her body really was a wreck, wasn't it?

"OK," he said. "Shoes and glasses off, get into bed."

"Clothes?" she croaked.

"I'm sure you've slept in them before. Do it, Harry, don't make me have to tuck you up in bed."

She started to tug her trainers off. Surprisingly obedient when she was tired, useful to remember that. OK, now distract her mind, while her body succumbed to sleep.

"Recite the kings of England," he said.

"Sod off, Sherlock."

Stroppy zombie, was she? Well, if she wanted to play hardball, she was almost certainly too tired to lie, and probably even to block his questions.

"Why did you seduce Molly?" he demanded. Her tear-reddened eyes gazed up at him short-sightedly from her bed.

"She's sweet...interesting. She n-needs someone to be n-nice to her."

"Why did you seduce Clara?"

"N-none of your business."

"She was engaged to John. That makes it my business."

A long pause, and then Harry muttered: "Because I'm an idiot."

"Yes, but not a nasty idiot, except when you're desperate for a drink. So why did you hurt John like that?"

"I didn't m-mean to."

"Then why?" _Shine the bedside light in her face, maybe? Maybe not._ "Why?" he snapped, and her mouth seemed to open of its own accord.

"Clara wanted it," Harry croaked. "Asked m-me."

"Why?" he said, and his voice was soft now, alluring. She'd kept this hidden for a long time, she must want to tell someone. "Tell me why, Harry. Make me understand."

There was a very long silence. Which was caused, as he eventually realised, by the fact that with impeccable crappy timing, Harry had finally fallen asleep.


	17. Monday: Molly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The weekend's over at last, but is the coming week going to be any better?

As Molly got dressed for work, she knew it was going to be a really bad week. But she'd get through it, wouldn't she? _Did you think I'd crumble, did you think I'd lay down and die? Oh no, not I, I will survive_. Maybe she should change her ringtone to that, she thought, as her mobile went off. A text...from Sherlock.

 _Meet me at the mortuary, 8.30 am. Need to discuss things. SH_

It was as if he knew what had happened, how shitty her life was. Come to think of it, he probably did know, because Harry would have told John about the breakup. So this was Sherlock coming to say: _I am so sorry, and, by the way, can you let me borrow somebody's toes?_ Fake sympathy, so he could exploit her. Well, she wasn't going to put up with that anymore. She texted back rapidly:

 _Bugger off, Sherlock. Molly_

That'll show him, she thought, and smiled for the first time in days.

***

But, of course, when she got to Barts, Sherlock was waiting by the mortuary entrance, glamorous and irritating as ever.

"If you want to perform experiments on any of the bodies here," she said rapidly, "I need a written request, with a supporting recommendation from a senior member of staff. But not Mike Stamford, because I know you can forge his signature."

"I'm not here about corpses," he said, smiling, "well, not yet. Harry here's still alive, and I'd prefer to keep her that way."

It was then that she registered a tiny figure sitting on the floor beside Sherlock's feet. Harry, looking like a kitten about to be put in a sack and drowned. Sitting there mutely, as if talking and standing up were both beyond her strength.

"The coffee shop would probably be best," Sherlock said. "There's bound to be something in the mortuary that'll have Harry keeling over again. She's already a bit wobbly since she found a pigeon in our bathroom this morning."

Poor Harry, Molly thought, if she was staying at 221B, she must be desperate.

"I wasn't expecting you to be...eviscerating it," Harry said, her chin in the air, trying to look tough, and just looking like a rather cross kitten. "N-not before breakfast."

"You'd have vomited even more if you'd had breakfast," Sherlock replied. "Coffee shop?"

***

"A few days ago," Sherlock announced, once Molly returned to the table with their coffees - and blueberry muffins, because Harry liked them, and she ought to eat _something_ \- "you found six bottles of whisky in Harry's flat. But Harry didn't put them there. A man called Pat 'Wormy' Wormald did."

"Who on earth is he?"

"A petty crook who was living in the flat above Harry. The man responsible for Harry's ceiling collapsing last year. And the man who promptly hid a cache of stolen bottles in Harry's flat."

He started to lay out the story. It sounded unreal, Molly thought. But then the whole situation was unreal: Sherlock having coffee with her, with Harry beside him, hunched over the muffin she was eating, not looking at Molly.

"This really happened?" she said at last. "Have you got proof?" Could she be having some particular vivid dream?

"It's circumstantial only," said Sherlock reluctantly. "I haven't been able to find Wormald or his associates. There must have been at least one other man with him that day. Slim enough to force his way through the hole in Harry's ceiling and tall enough so that Wormald could hand the bottles down to him."

"Could someone really do that?"

"Easy enough, and there's a Yale lock, so the man could just have let himself out of Harry's flat afterwards. Not a bad hiding place at short notice. I can only presume Wormald got kicked out of his own flat before he had a chance to retrieve the bottles the same way."

"So that's why they were left there?" Molly said. She knew it was a dodgy place to live, but she'd never imagined it was like that.

"They were unlucky. Harry was away for several weeks, and when she returned, she'd sobered up and there were builders around. Wormald must have decided to cut his losses."

"It doesn't sound possible," she said.

"Whereas you consider it perfectly possible that Harry goes out and buys six bottles of an expensive brand of whisky and hides them away for later consumption? Harry's got the impulse control of a poorly-trained seven-year old. If she'd wanted alcohol that badly, she'd have got drunk immediately on something cheaper. She simply doesn't have the foresight to plan a binge like that. Besides, how else do you explain the fingerprints, and the plaster dust?"

"You didn't say the p-plaster p-proved anything last n-n-night," Harry said, suddenly looking up.

"Yes I did, you just weren't listening," said Sherlock haughtily. "There was plaster dust on the bottles. Not surprising, it gets everywhere when the plasterers are in, but it was the wrong colour plaster. The original ceiling was cream, the replacement plaster is white. The bottles have fragments of cream plaster, but not white, ergo they were put in the cupboard after the ceiling had been damaged and before it had been replaced. All fits perfectly. Satisfied, Molly?"

"My ceiling wasn't cream," Harry stated.  "It's white, it's always been white."

"As ever, you see but you do not observe," Sherlock retorted. "Most people go around with their eyes closed, but you're the worst of the lot. Of course you don't remember what colour your ceiling was, you couldn't even remember that the whisky bottles had nothing to do with you."

"I know the colours of my flat-"

"Shut up, Harry!" Sherlock snapped.

"No, you shut up, Sherlock!" a voice said. Molly’s own voice. She glared at Sherlock. "Stop bullying Harry. It's not her fault she can't always remember things. Just because you're so clever, it doesn't give you the right to sneer at other people."

Sherlock and Harry had both gone quiet, and they were looking at her, as if they'd never seen her before.

"Sherlock," she said more calmly. "I'm very grateful to you for sorting this out, because I was horribly, horribly wrong about Harry. But can you please go away now, because I need to talk to her."

Harry's hand, warm and soft, reached out across the table to hers.

"M-Molly's right," Harry said, "and anyhow, Sherlock, if you go now, you'll have time to m-meet John's train at King's Cross."

"Why on earth should I need to do that?" Sherlock replied. "He's a grown man, he's entirely capable of making his own way back to Baker Street."

"I didn't say you n-needed to do that," Harry said, gazing innocently up at Sherlock. "But you want to, don't you? I know how m-m-much you've been m-missing him. So why don't you go and find him?"

"Because I've been endeavouring to prevent you doing anything stupid this weekend. But since Molly has apparently resumed her duties as your keeper, my work is done. Au revoir." He stalked off, his coat swirling behind him.

Harry watched him go, and then started giggling slightly hysterically.

"Are you OK?" Molly asked.

"I've just encouraged him to make this big romantic gesture," Harry said, still giggling, "and I forgot about the dead p-pigeon in the bath at 221B. John...John's not going to be p-pleased."

Suddenly Molly was giggling as well, because Harry might be strange, but at least she didn't dissect pigeons in her flat. And after that it didn't seem to matter that she didn't know what to say, because Harry, with her usual impulsiveness, was lunging forward, starting to kiss Molly, and her hands were now in Molly's tidy hair, messing it up. It seemed entirely pointless to do anything more than kiss Harry back, and Harry's tongue, blueberry sweet, was teasing at her lips...

"Molly," someone said, and then added after a while, "erm, excuse me ladies." Molly detached herself from Harry just long enough to look up. Mike Stamford was standing beside their table, looking a little red-faced. Though not as red as Molly promptly went.

"I, I..," Mike said, with the air of a man trying very hard not to think about two women kissing, "I've got a class at ten down in the mortuary, and I needed to set things up."

"What time is it?" Harry said abruptly.

"Ten past nine," Mike said. "It's just-"

"Oh shit. I'm supposed to be discussing filth at ten," Harry said. "I, I'll phone you after that, M-Molly, if that's OK?"

"That's fine," said Molly, "Don't forget your bag," she added, as Harry hurried off. She turned to Mike. "There's an exhibition at the Wellcome Institute at the moment about dirt," she said, "and Harry's involved with some of the events. That's the sort of filth she's interested in..." Her voice tailed away.

"I've known Harry for a very long time," Mike replied, smiling. "And yes, I know what she's like. Did you two have a good weekend?"

"A little bit difficult," Molly replied, as they headed off to the mortuary. "But I'm sure this week's going to be a good one."


End file.
